VT’s Tech Blog

Here’s a new service from BritePic which allows you to add interactivity to the images on your site, and at the same time make some $$. BritePic allows you to place advertisements in your images, and allow users to zoom, email, create links to your images.

Here’s a sample image served by BritePic:

So instead of using the plain ol’ img tag to place your images in the page, use the BritePic way, good for you and your visitors

The BritePic code allows you to control the image size, image caption, keywords and the link to send the visitors to when they click on the image. You can choose whether you want ads displayed in the images. The ads appear in the image if AdBite has ads based on the keywords you supply for the image.

BritePic is a part of the Adbrite advertisement network.

Link: BritePic

Here’s a cool way to give users an option to upload files to the server. Features of SWFUpload:

• Only display chosen filetypes in dialog
• Upload multiple files at once by ctrl/shift-selecting in dialog
• Trigger javascript functions on start, cancel, progress and complete
• Get file information/size before upload starts
• Style upload buttons any way you want
• Do progress-bars/information using valid XHTML and CSS
• No page reloads, display uploaded files as they are finished
• Works on all platforms/browsers that has Flash support.
• Degrades gracefully to a normal html upload form if Flash or javascript isn’t available
• Control filesize before upload starts

Download: SWFUpload beta

Heard about Flash remoting?

It’s a method for Flash to communicate with a web application server. Here’s how Macromedia defines Flash remoting:

“Macromedia Flash Remoting MX provides the connection between Macromedia Flash and your web application server, making it fast and easy to create Rich Internet Applications. With its powerful yet simple programming model, you can easily integrate rich Macromedia Flash content with applications built using Macromedia ColdFusion MX, Microsoft .NET, Java, and SOAP-based web services.”

AMF-PHP is a project to allow Flash Remoting using PHP. This project was started because Macromedia didn’t provide integration with PHP for Flash Remoting.
Here’s a tutorial from sephiroth.it which shows you how to create an image gallery using Flash and PHP using AMF-PHP:

Link: Create an image gallery with AMFPHP

FlashObject is a small Javascript file used for embedding Macromedia Flash content. The script can detect the Flash plug-in in all major web browsers (on Mac and PC) and is designed to make embedding Flash movies as easy as possible. It is also very search engine friendly, degrades gracefully, can be used in valid HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents, and is forward compatible, so it should work for years to come.

deconcept › FlashObject: Javascript Flash detection and embed script

An interesting article from IBM on using PHP with OpenLaszlo.

This “Spice up PHP applications with OpenLaszlo” tutorial series shows you how to use OpenLaszlo to create a more interactive interface for your PHP applications and how to use PHP to create more dynamic OpenLaszlo applications. It requires a basic understanding of — or willingness to learn — XML, JavaScript, and PHP. Each is well worth knowing for its own merits, plus they plug and play together nicely, since they’re all based on synergistic open standards.

On the server side, PHP is a widely supported scripting language that produces and reads XML data, interfacing easily with relational databases and other programs. PHP is great for implementing AJAX applications with service-oriented architectures. And it’s a smart choice for integrating Web services that use common Internet protocols, such as HTTP, XML-RPC, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Representational State Transfer (REST).

On the client side, OpenLaszlo is an elegant XML-centric, JavaScript-based Web programming language. It’s designed for implementing interactive, media-rich, distributed, user-friendly interfaces to XML-based Web services. For programmers, the OpenLaszlo language is fun and feature-rich. For users, OpenLaszlo applications are richer and more responsive than conventional browser-based applications. (See Resources for available OpenLaszlo applications.)

Link: Spice up PHP applications with OpenLaszlo, Part 1: Create interactive interfaces (requires free registration to view)

Here’s a list of Chart & Graph modules which work with PHP. I personally like PHP/SWF Charts and FusionCharts, which are Flash based charts which you can interface to from PHP. Here’s a list of resources which I checked out.

1. PHP/SWF Charts
2. Fusion Charts
3. Advanced Graph and Chart Collection for PHP
4. RChart PHP Edition
5. ChartDirector
6. JP Graph

Most of the commercial products like PHP/SWF charts and Fusion Charts have a free version also available.

All you flash web-designers, take a look at this site and eat your hearts out!
http://www.ifizzle.com/ifizzle.html

Came across a fabulous site today. The site looks like a Mac PC, and broadcasts great music ! Spent quite a while at the site just listening to the collection of songs there.

This guy’s got to be a master of Flash. He’s emulate the Mac desktop quite well in terms of visuals and functionality. Checked out his shoutbox – quite a few job offers there for him
Link: The iFizzle – Impossibly Kick-Ass