XPLANE Corporate Website

URL:

http://www.xplane.com

Synopsis:

XPLANE is an information design consultancy that drives better results for many of the world’s leading corporations including Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, U.S. Department of National Intelligence, U.S. Marines, Nike and BP through visual thinking and design.

Working with the internal marketing and design teams at XPLANE, the entire website was built on the WordPress platform utilizing a custom developed theme to match XPLANE's branding. Content highlights include project case studies, company news, and an online store.

The internal marketing team handles all day-to-day updates utilizing the content management features of WordPress, allowing them to eaisly add, edit and remove all content on the website. Since the site launch XPLANE has also seen significant increase in search engine optimization (SEO) and daily unique page views.

The site is listed in the WordPress Showcase, an honor since only a relatively small number of submissions are added to the showcase.

The XPLANE e-store:

Case studies:

Company news:

To see the full site, visit http://www.xplane.com.

Along with this release the public gateway has also been updated to use SWX PHP v2 beta and allow for AS3 support. You can find documentation here, which shows how to use the new AS3 API as well as provides an introduction to the new Simple Call and Custom Call methods of interacting with your SWX gateway.

Lastly, Folkert Hielema has contributed an updated Twitter service and a new Identi.ca service. Both of these services are live on the public gateway (you can test them in the Service Explorer) and also available in the SWX PHP download available on the Google Code page under "Featured Downloads".

I will continue to work on updating the SWX blog with new documentation, but until then please refer to this documentation - it should provide you with everything you need to get started with v2.

If you notice any issues, please log them here. For support or to discuss the new release, please use the project's mailing list.

This release has been a huge effort by the SWX development team, and has been in the works since September. I'm sure you'll enjoy using it as much as we've enjoyed coding it.

Can't wait to see what you build!

Jason and I used our experiences in building the p.i.n.k. Spirits website as a platform for testing the concepts and they worked so well that we decided to write an article. The article covers using SWFAddress and SWFObject with PHP to provide your content in an alternate view (in this case HTML instead of Flash) for SEO purposes.

The article contends that when Adobe announced they were working with Google and Yahoo! to improve the searchability of Flash and Flex websites and applications, the Flash development community largely applauded the initiative. However, months after the announcement there has been minimal increase in the effective search engine rankings of Flash and Flex websites.

We discuss why the current method of Google and Yahoo!'s new 'headless player' isn't working quite yet, and how you can provide a mirror of the exact same content in your Flash and Flex projects as HTML using a single data source. This is a 'white hat' approach and doesn't break any of Google's rules.

There have recently been some articles on how Google has been updating the 'headless player', namely this article on InsideRIA, and I may do a blog post updating the article if necessary. Until then, be sure to check out the article in the January 2009 issue of Flash & Flex Developers Magazine.

I have seen a lot of people complaining about this (and Adobe has responded really well and explained their solid reasoning), but the fix is actually really simple and takes only two minutes to install. Just download the ZIP file mentioned in this blog comment on WordPress.org, copy the included files over your current installation, and you'll be all set. The fix includes a new version of SWFUpload, which is used on the WordPress upload page in the admin panel.

[Update September 5, 2008 - a different fix was suggested in an attempt to allow SWX to continue to be used by hitting the gateway directly, allowing for easier debugging. Code below reflects this update.]

The problem is that FP 10 does not like one of the headers returned from SWX. To fix the issue, open SwxAssembler.php and change line 538 from:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="data.swf"');

to:

header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="data.swf"');

This seems to fix the issue, as all SWX sites this has been tested on now work in FP 10.

Thanks to Fabrício for finding the proper solution, and to Folkert Hielema and Ben Lagoutte for helping test broken sites and debug the issue.

This is a great example of how to use various services, such as Flickr, to fit your simple mashup needs -- just like David and Shaun spoke about at FITC Hollywood a few months ago. Great idea, fellas!

The Gal to Gal Walk site completed a few months back, which was one of (if not the) first large-scale site completed using SWX, won the website category. In addition, the Verisign Payment API service which was written for use on the Gal to Gal Walk site and enables interaction with the Versign/PayPal Payment Gateway through SWX came in third place in the services category.

There was some great competition, so I'm really happy to have placed in two categories and am also excited about the amazing prize package Aral has put together. What a great unexpected holiday gift!

A huge thanks to Aral and the sponsors!

Project:

p.i.n.k. Spirits website

URL:

http://www.pinkspirits.com

Synopsis:

This high-profile consumer site was built for p.i.n.k. Spirits -- a new premium liquor company which creates various liquors infused with caffeine and guarana. The best way to describe their product is your favorite liquor and RedBull, without the RedBull taste, calories, or color. The first product to launch is vodka, with gin, tequila, rum, whisky, sake and others to follow in 2008/2009.

Why it is cool (to a Flash developer):

- The site makes great use of a couple of open source tools: SWFAddress 2.0 and SWX.

- The site was almost 5 months in design and development.

- SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end content database. Once again this made the creation of the CMS go much faster and communication between the site and CMS much smoother. SWX is also used for e-mail list sign-up, and I have released this service open source as part of the SWX contest.

- An extensive listing of drink recipes, events, and venues can be found on the site.

- A custom retail store and bar/restaurant locator was developed for the site, providing users with the distance from their ZIP code to the local places they can find pink's products. I may release this as a SWX service in the future.

- I contracted with The Bailey Group of Philadelphia, PA on this project, whose talented designers concepted the site and team was great to work with.

- A huge thanks goes out to Jason McCoskery, who again was a great partner in development and whose overall development knowledge in both PHP and ActionScript is always enjoyable to work with.

For the initial push I posted: SmoothImageLoader (AS2), RegExp (AS2), Tooltip (AS2), BadFilter (AS2), ConstantContact (PHP), and SubmitVerisignPayment (PHP). For more details on these classes, please visit:

http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/code/

Enjoy!

The competition has three categories: Web, Mobile, and API, and each of the three winners will receive a prize package worth almost $4,000. Not a shabby deal at all. The prize packages include a copy of Adobe CS 3 Web Premium Bundle, a one year premium subscription to Lynda.com, a Nabaztag/tag wi-fi bunny, and an iPod Touch. I have a Nabaztag/tag, and winning one of these alone is worth a few hours of work!

If you have been following the SWX project at all, you already know that I have used SWX on a couple of projects and that I am a huge fan of its simplicity. It just works, and it makes your life as a developer easier. What's not to like? This contest is the perfect way to give it a shot and possibily win some cool stuff.

More details on the contest can be found on the SWX site.