I’ve just made my first commit to GitHub, and it consists of a modified version of as3syndication lib that will work in the Flash IDE. You may recall that earlier I proposed the fix and offered the files here. Now, if you prefer, you can just go to my profile at GitHub.

The people may now rejoice.

I’m pleased to formally announce the relaunch of my portfolio at www.agitcraft.com. It’s been a long,  winding, mostly poorly organized effort on my part consisting of numerous missteps and restarts. I’ve technically been working on this iteration of the site for about 4 months (from scratch), although I’ve been grinding away at redesign efforts both with this domain and with my previous portfolio at altpixel.net for well over two years now. To give you a vague idea of how long this has been brewing, the svn I’ve been working out of is currently in revision 381 after going through at least 4 branches, and I’m the only person developing this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due:

• Jack Doyle for the greensock tweening platform (which makes all the animation in the site possible), without which I’m sure I would have gone crazy long ago.
• The entire Papervision3d team for their excellent 3D package, which powers the 3D “solar system” motif that I use to display my interface.
• The team of developers who’ve thus far worked on as3syndicationlib. There were a couple issues I ran into, but they were minor in the long run and they certainly don’t take away from the fact that I was able to parse and consolidate 5 feeds in real time with only a few lines of code. Awesome!
• The developers of PureMVC, for making a framework that has literally changed the way that I work on large projects and made my site possible.
• Matt McInerny at the League of Movable Type for providing the fantastic “Raleway” typeface I’m using both in my logo and for section headers.
• An anonymous sound fx provider at flashkit.com for providing the ominous intro tune that plays when the site loads. I say anonymous because I was inattentive when I grabbed the audio and forgot to take note of the name/location of the file I snagged. I dug around today but could not, for the life of me, find the file on there. If anybody recognizes it let me know and I’ll give a proper shout out.

The wealth of libraries and tools freely available is part of what makes Flash such an exciting platform to develop for. I certainly could not have completed a project of this scale without them.

Anyway, if you like the site let other people see it. If you have problems with it let me know. I’m hoping this remains a growing work rather than a one-off showpiece.

Perhaps you, like me, have had a need, at some point or another, to parse RSS feeds in Actionscript. If so, then perhaps you’ve also stumbled across the generally wonderful as3syndicationlib developed by Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell. For those of you who aren’t in the know, allow me to provide the following excerpt from the project’s google code page:

Use the syndication library to parse Atom and all versions of RSS easily. This library hides the differences between the formats so you can parse any type of feed without having to know what kind of feed it is.

These claims actually hold up pretty well…once you get the code running.

The problem is that the codebase was written specifically for development in Flex. While Flex is a great platform for certain projects, many of us still use Flash for a lot of the work we do, so a toolkit that relies on packages that are only available to Flex just doesn’t do it.

This problem is also no secret. It’s listed as an accepted issue on its project page. The problem is that the codebase apparently hasn’t been updated since December of 2006.  That’s no joke kids.

Fortunately, a solution was pushed forth from outside the project by a Mr. Martin Legris in the form of a bare implementation of the missing “DateBase” class that the syndication library looks for, as well as an edit to an import statement buried down in ParsingTools.as.

So if you, like me, have a need to consume RSS/Atom Feeds in Flash and need a solution that works, look no further. I present, to you, an updated version of the as3 syndication library with the necessary changes in place to begin using it out of the box in your flash projects.

The files are all available here.