Things have been rather chaotic, hectic and a bit confused as you might find from some of my entries on SM and I’ve sort of fallen out of the habit of making my daily entries here – especially given that I didn’t have much in the way of tech stuff to talk about. I haven’t really felt like coding and so have been taking it easy, dabbling in video, audio and most recently Flash. I’ve always felt ambivalent about Flash since while it did look nifty, I just couldn’t seem to accept as part of “pure” web design. So, while I’d think of using Flash, in the end I’d steer clear of it. However, a friend needed to work with Flash recently and so I got involved and in the process I actually came to do a bit of work with Flash, though it was not Macromedia’s product that I used but rather Swish. It’s a neat product and pretty easy to use and while I don’t think I’d still be tempted to use Flash since my taste in web design runs towards the KISS principle, I can at least pretend to myself that I know something about Flash now :p
I’ve also been contemplating getting back into coding but wasn’t sure what project to take up – I know that Blog 8.0 needs to be worked on but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to get back to Blog immediately and so was actually contemplating the often mentioned PostMan, which is actually an e-mail client. The greatest problem that I’d had with PostMan had been the slow HTML rendering but now I thought I had a solution which might overcome that problem. But I was debating whether to try that or get back into Blog and so did neither till one of the Blog users, Lena, decided the matter by reporting a problem with archive table of contents templates. I started looking into the problem and discovered that there was a bug in the code that needed to be fixed. I fixed that but since I was already on a roll, I decided to fix a few more issues.
A couple of bug fixes later, I had a release that I was beginning to name Blog 7.11 when I received an e-mail from Collin where he mentioned that it would be pretty nifty if Blog could support the new Windows Media Player 9.0 option to display it’s playlist in blogs. I had seen the blogging add-in for Media Player 9.0 mentioned on the MS site but had not given much attention till now but now I went over there and downloaded Media Player 9.0 and the blogging add-in. However, I got no chance to look into it any further since I was distracted by other stuff but if it looks as if it’s a simple thing to implement, I’ll probably add that feature to Blog 7.11 before I release it 🙂
Fahim, e-mail coming up!