Hey! I re-skinned the linkjoin website. Orange was such a bad idea. It started out with a little splash of orange and by the time I put all the stuff into the site that I wanted, it was a mess of large, unwieldy shades of orange and yellow. And, while orange can definitely be fun, it wasn’t the right fit for linkjoin. In the process of re-skinning the website, a new color was born! Green. Green is an amazingly awesome color and now the demographics charts (as well as some other focus areas) have green in them for some extra visual oomph. Check it out: I also made the pie chart “slices” sort of pop out, because that’s fun and, as the creator and developer, I get to do whatever I want to it.

We’ve given linkjoin a few upgrades in the last week. Since hyperlink submission and tracking was managed solely on a per-computer basis, members have requested registration/login capabilities to enable them to view their hyperlinks and tracking information from multiple computers. This is now a possibility.

As well as being able to use linkjoin as a completely anonymous user, users can also register for free and no matter where they log in from, they will be able to manage their data.

We’ve also added demographics data!! Now, in addition to being able to see which links are most popular and when users click on them, users can also view which browsers and referring websites are most popular. The image above is an example of my personal linkjoin account.

Click here to try it out yourself.. IT’S FREE!

It’s amazing what you can program with four decent hours. This module is called AS3 Twitter Feed and it was developed for the company that I work for. It’s basically an improved version of the AJAX Twitter Feed module that was on this website before, which has since been replaced with this one. This module is powered, as most of my modules are, by ActionScript, PHP and XML. It’s also resizable and completely skinnable including the color scheme (by changing the skin’s XML values or using a built-in color scheme), a custom avatar (or leave the setting blank to use your current Twitter avatar) and a custom “Follow Me” image (I used a stupid blue bird holding a sign). Cliche, I know.

This module isn’t available to the public yet, but it should be soon. I’m still waiting on some technical things to get worked out before I can release it.

If you want to check it out, just look at the lower-left section of this site. Thanks!

Recently, I’ve decided to revamp some of our proprietary products at work. Some of the products that I’ve been wanting to update for a while now are: the outward-facing BHI Marketing Tools website, our Rotating Banner (written in AS3) and our FLV Player (also written in AS3).

We’ve been wanting to redesign our business website, BHI Design, ever since I started working here. But let’s be honest – that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. So! Out of boredom – and a lack of anything better to do – I redesigned our sister website, BHI Marketing Tools, a website that I started about two years ago as an additional revenue source. The new design is fully implemented and includes features that we really needed for a while. Some of the features include: our parent business’ contact information, a little auto-biography about the company and what we do, a completely different approach to our previous implementation of AJAX Forms (client login, feedback, etc), our featured projects, links to our Twitter and Facebook accounts and a way for visitors to join our electronic newsletter list.

I really like the new layout and I think it conveys our message to visitors better than the previous version. We still have to migrate the application interface (what our clients see) to reflect the homepage a little better, but that isn’t very important at the moment.

I’ve also rewritten two of our smaller projects: FLV Player [AS3] and Rotating Banner [AS3]. As many of you can probably imagine, FLV Player is a simple video player that can stream any FLV file to your website. It supports any length of video and has been tested up to resolutions of 1280×720. There isn’t a fullscreen mode yet, but it will definitely be added to any future releases if we get a request for it. The Rotating Banner is pretty self-explanatory. You load the SWF onto your website and point it to an XML file containing image URLs, hyperlinks, transition type, etc. Both of these projects can be seen in action on the BHI Marketing Tools website. (I know it seems like I’m trying to promote the crap out of that website, but it’s where most of my projects end up being used).

So, check them out. Let me know if you like them. If you have any questions or comments, please post them. Thanks!

We finally finished painting the green screen wall… as well as rearranging everything in that area to make room for me to walk around and record semi-decent video. It took a lot of paint and roughly two weeks of off-and-on working, but it’s done. Well, the painting is anyway. We still want to buy a set of track lights for more even lighting (does anyone know where we can pick up a cheap – decent – set of track lights?). The way it’s set up now (relying on the fluorescent lights in the ceiling), there are obvious shadows being cast in less-than-ideal locations. However, once we get our hands on a set of track lights, we’re going to be one step closer to making cheesy, Godzilla-esque horror films.

I’ve posted the demo video of me walking around, talking and dangling things in front of the green screen. I brought it into After Effects CS4 and then converted the video to FLV for streaming it via Adobe Flash. I didn’t, however, write a streaming component or a playback controller, so the movie is approximately 9MB.

Click here to watch the demo reel. No fancy preloader, I apologize.

So you might have noticed that I haven’t been updating my blog as often as I used to. You might also be asking something like, “Why, Jimmy? Why haven’t you been updating it as often? Have you been busy?” And I would reply with something like, “Yep!”. I’ve actually been devoting a lot of time to our online suite of eMarketing Tools called BHI Marketing Tools. The system is starting to increase in popularity and with that comes a lot of troubleshooting, technical support, new services, yada yada… We’ve decided that we should create a demo account for this beast so potential clients and customers can log in, fiddle with the system, send some test emails to themselves and see if they like it… Maybe give us some money (we have bills too, you know!).

The login information for the demo account is ridiculously easy to remember. You just go to BHI Marketing Tools in your browser, click “Client Login” and use the username demo / password demo and you’re in like Flynn.

So, check it out, give it a whirl, see if you like it. If you do, tell your friends people with gobs of money.