agitcraft

Today I was working on reorganizing the journal section of my portfolio. The problem that I’ve run into is that the entire journal ends up being dominated by items from individual feeds rather than an interesting mix.

RSS Overflow!

The reason for this is obvious: I listen to dozens of songs everyday, but only write so many blog posts, tweet so many times, and bookmark so many pages. As a result, when I first debuted the site, a coworker innocently complimented me on the “playlist” section of the site.

The solution, in my mind, is to break the content up from a single list into smaller lists, each with a limited number of items on display. Since the content will now be limited, the data I download should be limited as well. My RSS feeds should be limited by the number of items I actually expect to display (in this case, about 5 per feed).

What I’m here to tell you today is that while limiting RSS feeds is as easy as appending a query string to the end of your feed url, the actual parameter used varies from feeed to feed. Here are my discoveries:

1. Delicious and Twitter feeds can be limited by using the count parameter in your query string.
2. Last.FM can be limited by using the limit parameter in your query string.
3. WordPress can supposedly be limited by using amount (or at least Safari seems to think so…), but I wasn’t able to get the feed to behave differently using either that or either of the alternatives above. The only way I was able to change the number of items in my wordpress feed was via my admin panel.

Why the inconsistency? Who the hell knows. What do you prefer? Personally I feel most comfortable with limit as it reminds me of what I would use in other areas (SQL).

So recently, as you may know, I redesigned my personal portfolio. In the time since, I’ve intended not only to actually continue updating said portfolio (as well as modifying certain sections), but I was also hoping to finish up a redesign for the blog to match. As usual, I’ve been highly distracted by other things, including the construction and launch of my first AIR app and other fun and games.

I have a design for the new blog, but it’s going to take me some time to actually slap it together into a usable wordpress theme. In the mean time, I figured the blog needed a makeover. I selected this theme because it’s clean and functional. Hopefully I’ll have something custom some time soon.

Hey readers. I haven’t been updating in the last few weeks for personal reasons. I’m back now.

I’m working on a release version for my first public AIR app, and on a redesign for this blog to match a little better with my new portfolio.

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.

UPDATE: This content has been migrated to a permanent page of the blog. Please direct any comments or questions to the new page.

Recently, while working on my portfolio, I was presented with the problem of displaying YouTube content extracted from an RSS feed in Flash. On the one hand there was the difficulty of parsing embed and object tags and extracting relevant data from the mess I was given, and on the other hand there was the problem of displaying the content itself.

YouTube provides documentation for their api, but after digging around online I was surprised to find that nobody had gone through with packaging it in a format I was willing to work with. There is an ActionScript 3 YouTube Wrapper available online, but it presumes that the Chromeless YouTube Player (http://www.youtube.com/apiplayer?version=3) you download to play videos with will be accessed using a combination of the static ExternalInterface class and external JavaScripts.

This seems, to me, to be unnecessarily complicated.

I’ve gone through the trouble of picking through the API and creating a simple class that loads a chromeless player and exposes methods you can use to manipulate it and display content from YouTube, without requiring any external javascript.

The application above is written in Actionscript 3. Basic usage is as follows:

import com.agitcraft.youtube.YouTube;
import com.agitcraft.youtube.YouTubeEvent;
_tube = new YouTube();
_tube.cueURL("http://www.youtube.com/v/-CsA1CcA4Z8", 0);
addChildAt(_tube, 0);

Each of the methods made available in the official YouTube API is available in some form or another via this set of classes. When I have a little more time I’ll follow up with official documentation and availability via google code.

Download AS3 YouTube Classes

For well over a year now, I’ve been engaged in the process of moving and redesigning my professional portfolio. The current (a term I use loosely…) version is over 3 years old, and it’s sitting at a domain I don’t really use anymore. I initially began work on a relaunch almost immediately after my portfolio landed me a permanent job, but over the years I’ve been indecisive, full of excuses, and just generally unable to commit to any planned redesign.

I’m sure you know the cycle: You come up with a great design concept, plan about 80% of it, and jump excitedly into development. You make rapid progress initially, but as you delve deeper into the project you come across roadblocks and development stalls. After hammering away for weeks at a time on bugs that seem to multiply faster than you can fix them, you eventually come to consider the project too flawed to complete and scrap it.

Where do these flaws come from? In my case the culprits are poor planning, over-ambitious development goals, and lack of a consistent process for developing large scale applications.

What I once considered the “Redesign Cycle,” I will now be calling the “No-Design Cycle,” as the use of the prefix “re-” vaguely implies that eventually some new design is produced and launched.

This post, however, is not just about my failure to produce a new portfolio in several years, or about my enthusiasm for the current draft I’m working on. It’s about what, thus far, is proving an effective solution to this terrible problem. It’s called PureMVC. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

The claim made by proponents of PureMVC is that it allows you to program “at the speed of thought.” Outrageous, right? After picking the framework up several weeks ago and developing with it in the time since, I can mostly agree.

If you’d like to start working in PureMVC, you can download the AS3 port, check out the full API documentation, and follow the tutorial I used to get started learning the framework, courtesy of Ahmed Nuaman.

I just read a great article explaining the use and implementation of marking menus in AS3. This may be just the kind of interface I’m looking for for my long overdue portfolio relaunch. Check it out!