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Introducing Adobe AIR for Flash developers

Building an expense tracker on the new Adobe AIR security model

How to play FLV videos from YouTube using Flash Lite 3

Insult Dueler: Building a Flash game on Adobe AIR

Flickr Floater: Building an Adobe AIR application with Flex 3

Recreating MapCache on Adobe AIR

Introducing Adobe AIR for Ajax developers

Breaking down the on AIR bus tour Starbucks locator

Flickr Floater: Building an Adobe AIR application with Flex 3

Introducing Adobe AIR for Ajax developers

Recreating MapCache on Adobe AIR

Breaking down the on AIR bus tour Starbucks locator

Building eBay Desktop on Adobe AIR: What we learned along the way

Introducing Adobe AIR for Flex Developers

Breathing new life into Adobe Flash development with Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR Developer Derby winners

How to Design and Publish Your Website with KompoZer

Ajaxian » “Ajax” Forever?

XML.com: Flash to the Rescue

Oracle pushes enterprise Ajax frameworks - Computer Business Review

Exploring Flash Player support for high-definition H.264 video and AAC audio

The new Adobe Developer Connection: Content and community for developers

Designing for Flex - Appendix B: Further reading

Designing for Flex - Appendix A: Best practices

Designing for Flex - Part 3: Structuring your application

Designing for Flex - Part 2: Planning your application

Export CSS painlessly from website comps in Fireworks

Designing for Flex - Part 1: Overview and introduction to Flex

Introducing Flash Player 9 Update 3

Designing for Flex - Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop

Introducing Flash Player 9 Update 3

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

• The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
• Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
• None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
• The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.

My plan to save the housing market, the economy, and HostGator simultaneously…

First off HostGator is not in any kind of trouble so don’t let the title scare you.

One of the biggest issues plaguing HostGator from day one has been finding qualified system administrators. Getting business is the easy part for us! At times we purposely slow down sales in order to allow for the hiring of support techs to keep up with growth. The majority of job applicants we receive are from qualified system administrators with a great deal of experience in this industry, but they reside overseas. If they had a quick, easy, and legal way to come over to America, than we would be hiring them left and right. Unfortunately, this is not an option.

The plan:

I propose we allow any foreigner who purchases a home and lives in it, to become a US Citizen. What about their family? Allow them to stay on some type of visitor pass requiring them to live at the same house until they one day move out to purchase their own home. We could even charge a visitor tax that will contribute toward any costs that may come from their stay, such as schooling. The money generated from this program would result in billions of dollars a year in tax revenue.

The housing market currently has approximately 4.5 million unsold homes. I have no idea how many home sales something like this would generate, but I’m willing to bet it would be at least a million. HostGator alone would purchase a dozen plus homes if it meant a highly skilled admin from another country could come to America to work for us. This would be a major boost to the housing market, crashing home prices would stabilize and perhaps even start to rebound. If an immigrant is required to purchase a home before becoming a US citizen, than they are most likely either going to be making a very good living.

These people coming to the U.S. would be the system administrators, doctors, engineers, programmers, and would fill the void of many other specialized jobs that companies like HostGator are in dire need to fill. Do we need to worry about terrorists entering our country this way? Sure, but not anymore than we do about the 9 million illegal immigrants currently living in our country. Do we need to worry about American jobs being lost? They are already being lost due to the outsourcing that occurs. HostGator does not outsource and we actively seek employees that are local to our Houston office. However, with a field as specialized as web hosting, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the right talent.

We are paying our Chief Technology Officer $100,000’s of dollars a year through our Canadian office, yet he is not legally able to come work for us in America. We have spoken to several immigration lawyers, and no one can get him in. He has been denied at the border numerous times. Our CTO, David Collins has no criminal record and is by far the most honest person I have ever met.

Our government needs to stop bleeding money and start running a more like a business. Dave is begging to work for us in America, and would be paying taxes on his high salary income. He is the smartest administrator anyone in our company knows, and if it was not for him the 100+ HostGator employees would most likely be unemployed. We have a lot of businesses and people willing to pay big bucks in order to be allowed to live and work in America.

What makes a company great? Is it the pretty office, the cool name, or nifty business cards? No!

To be the best you have to have the best working for you. If our country keeps turning away the brightest such as Dave it’s only a matter of time before we are no longer the most powerful nation in the world. If you’re a part of the U.S. Government and are reading this please stop forcing American businesses to outsource to other countries. Allow us to bring in the talent we need to stay competitive with other nations. You can play it off and pretend it’s not a problem. After all HostGator, which is not that big, is the only company with this issue, right? It looks like Microsoft, is being forced to open a Canadian office to find the talent it needs.

“Microsoft Corp. plans to set up house in the Vancouver area this fall with a new software development centre that would attract talent without encountering U.S. immigration issues.” “The company said the new location will “allow the company to continue to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by the immigration issues in the U.S.”
Source: http://www.thestar.com/article/232774

$50,000 Reward:

We our offering a $50,000 cash reward to anyone that can get our CTO
David Collins legally into America! If it’s a bribe we have to make, it’s a
bribe we shall. If you’re sure you can do it contact jobs@HostGator.com
We are also offering a $3,000 reward to anyone that can refer us a
system administrator that we hire. Please email jobs@HostGator.com for
more information

Add us to:

Cisco MARS 4.3.1 Now Available

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WordPress 2.3

I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your posts, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you whats the latest and greatest you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery which is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post and the list of compatible plugins on the Codex.

A number of people are hosting upgrade parties around the world, including myself in San Francisco. If you are let me know and I’ll promote it on my blog.

AJAX: Usable Interactivity with Remote Scripting [JavaScript & AJAX Tutorials]

Getting started with Dreamweaver CS3 - tutorial

I just came across this great tutorial for the absolute beginner just starting with Dreamweaver. The tutorial is written for Dreamweaver CS3, and shows you how to create a new website using the tools.  The tutorial takes you from creating a site definition right to uploading the site to your server.

It assumes that you have a host, a domain, planned, and designed the site’s layout. If you don’t know how to do those things, the tutorial links out to other how-tos to show you how to do that as well.

These tutorials take advantage of the WYSIWYG tools in Dreamweaver, so you don’t need to worry about coding your site.

You can find the tutorial here:

http://www.vineyardesigns.com/resources/dreamweaver/

It also offers some special projects at the end if you want to go further with your site, after uploading it.

Using XML in Flash CS3

This great (7 page) tutorial from Kirupa.com shows you how to use XML in Flash CS3 - which involves using some ActionScript 3.0 code. If you’ve used XML in the earlier days of Flash, some of this will feel familiar to  you. However, Kirupa shows you some time-saving techniques that ActionScript 3.0 allows you to take advantage of. You learn a bit about XML structure, how to read the XML (using code), and finally how to filter some data.

This is a particularly excellent tutorial if you’ve used XML and ActionScript with Flash, and need to update your skills for Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3.0.

Find the tutorial here:

Using XML in Flash CS3/AS3 by Kirupa
Enjoy!

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