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Brace yourself; this is a cool application. Taking cues from PC Anywhere and Goto My PC, Mesh allows you to access your computers, devices, programs, and files, from any computer that has an internet connection. All you have to do is previously download and set up their software on your PC and then you can get access just by logging into mesh.com.

You can allow other Windows Live users to access certain parts of your mesh. Each time they open, save, or upload a file a history tab is updated, this information is also visible on the Task manager.

You also have 5 gb of space on the virtual desktop to use as you want. No more emailing yourself a file, no more thumb drives that never have enough space for that big file…

The rest of the folders and devices in your mesh are set up like a shared network – except they’re accessible by anyone on the mesh from anywhere on the mesh. Unlike network shared locations, or firewalls this is built into the browser using ssl, the same scripts your online bank uses, so the information is secure.

I installed and started working with mesh yesterday and am pretty darn impressed. So far the only hitch I’ve seen so far is some weird things happen when I’m remotely connected to a PC with 2 monitors from a PC with 1. Im guessing once I connect the second monitor to the other it will be fine and scale without issue.

However, for a free application in beta testing, this is pretty good.

See the into video that will explain a lot more about how mesh works
Go to their website.

I saw this morning that A List Apart is doing their second annual web designers survey. I took part last year and am glad to take part again this year. Web business in general are run pretty differently than most other industries and this project hopes to help to decode just what sort of an industry we have made. Maybe even shed some light on where we’re going.

Last year about 33,000 people took it and its definetly worth checing back in on once they publish the results. Do you’re part and spend 5 minutes to take the survey, its easy.




Just learned a great function of PHP thats already made my forms a lot better. A while back I wrote an article about eliminating form spam without captchas by using css to hide a text input box for bots to fill in. By giving the input box a legit sounding name like “email” the bots fall for the trap and the php handler discards their form entry results.

The only problem was that I still got blank entries every now and again from people using their back button, or search engine spiders. You could also trick the validation script by surfing with java turned off . And while I still dont know exactly which one of the above was the cause I have an ultimate solution.

The equal to and not equal to feature in PHP.

Instead of:

if ($test == "") {
mail($mailto, $mailsubj, $mailbody, $mailhead);
}

We use:

if ($test == "" && $email != "") {
mail($mailto, $mailsubj, $mailbody, $mailhead);
}

This little change not only checks to see that there is nothing in the hidden field but also checks to see that there IS something in the email field. As the email is required this is nothing new, but will dump all the blank entries I’ve been getting.

FYI:
&& = = and
!= = not equal to

For one of my soon to be released projects I was asked to create a footer background image that was stuck to the bottom of the website or broswer window. Finding a cross browser css footer was a pain, and inplementing it took some trial and error with the numbers but it worked!

Thanks going to:
http://ryanfait.com/sticky-footer/
For his great tutorial on the subject, and his solution.

A more graphical tutorial can be found here: http://fortysevenmedia.com/blog/archives/making_your_footer_stay_put_with_css/

I wrote my first javascript application last night. I know it’s not very complex, its actually just a form handler. All the same though, I had wanted to write the handler in php, but that was not going to work as it would require the page to reload.

After I figured out I was using the wrong language it didn’t take long to find some tutorials and learn the basics. Knowing a little php and html of course helped a lot. Variables and whatnot work in pretty much the same way, so far the biggest difference is just that java is case sensitive.

The W3school did a wonderful of pointing me in the right direction.
Here is a list of their basic javascript examples. I highly recommend it.

There are three main limitations at present, and google is working to resolve them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!

“Today Adobe systems made an announcement that it has provided technology and information to Google and Yahoo! to help the two search engine rivals index Shockwave Flash (SWF) file formats. According to the company, this will provide more relevant search rankings of the millions pieces of flash content. “

This is huge news! Until now you’ve had to recode the flash with swapping divs, xml, or other such trickery to get the search engines to read any part of it. It should be noted that neither company has disclosed how they will implement this new crawling software or how it will affect their algorithm, but none the less, this is progress being made.
It should be noted that this will only affect Yahoo and Google, so all the little search engines and content scraping websites will still be unable to read or harvest content. So the old work a rounds will still be used by real web developers to guarantee results across the board.

http://www.desktopography.net/
Holy crap, this might be the coolest desktop background place Ive ever seen.

Digital Blasphemy is good as well, but this is the next level.

Current Desktop: Flying Low

 

Runner Up: Lush

Amazing work. Keep it up.

Hatters Workshop is moving into Hartford. We’re growing up and moving out of the house we started in. This is a big step, which hopefully won’t end in financial ruin (kidding!). I’m excited to have my own space that I can really do anything with. I still have to arrange the furniture, put on some closet doors, and change the lights from being all fluorescent lights.

I might have the only PC only design lab in Connecticut, which might put some people off, but I still say that it saves me a conversion step with almost all my clients. They don’t use mac, the world doesn’t use mac (in general) so why should all the design work be done on a platform that is unused by the rest of the world?

I should have an Amazing intern starting once the move is complete, and the work is still rolling in. I’ve got to write two proposals by the end of the day and the phone never stops ringing. Thank goodness I don’t advertise or I’d never see light.

Thank you all for reading this, and being a witness to history.

Problem: Flash preloader has delayed visibility or flash preloader is not visible until most of the video is loaded already.

Solution: You have too many things loading on frame 1. The only thing that should be in the first frame should be your preloader. All code and other content should start on frame 2. This guarantees that your preloader loads first.

If your preloader doesn’t appear until well into the load time then you likely have media content that’s set in the linkage tab to export in the first frame (auto selected when you set it to link with action script). This is important as content that is unused in the movie is not included in the final .swf file, but by loading the content on the first frame it screws with your preloader. The work around is to include the content on frame 3, and have your movie begin on frame 5.

This way the preloader loads on frame 1. Checks and rewinds on frame 2. If all frames are loaded then it goes to frame 5 and plays. It never actually plays the media in frame 3 or 4, but by being in the timeline they are loaded and can still be referenced with variables in action script without disrupting the preloader.

Something I learned while I was working on the litchfieldathleticclub.com site.

Happy coding.

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