Because WP-Cumulus is open source software, the source files are available online. I didn’t package them with the regular plugin download, but you can download the Flash files from wordpress.org and my blog. Included in those downloads is a file called “tagcloud.xml”, which is mainly used to test the Flash movie locally, within Flash’s IDE. Unfortunately, that file sometimes ends up online. And, in most cases, it shouldn’t.

This is not the cloud you’re looking for…

To properly (or rather: easily) develop and test the Flash movie that’s the heart of WP-Cumulus, it needs content. Without a set of tags, there’s nothing to see. So I created a file called “tagcloud.xml”. It’s loaded into the movie only if no tags are supplied through the regular route (flashvars). The tagcloud.xml bundled with the source code download is an older, outdated “dump” of my blog’s tags. That’s okay for testing, as long as its contents don’t get indexed by search engines.

Until recently, Google wasn’t very good at looking into swf (Flash) files, but it appears that this has changed. From what I can tell, Google now processes the actionscript inside, at least well enough to detect calls to external files. Unfortunately, Google’s bot isn’t quite smart enough to realize this particular file is only loaded as a fallback mechanism. And as a result, it tries to index the tag cloud xml file. This results in three possible scenarios.

Option 1: No tagcloud.xml file: 404 errors

If you’re running the stock WordPress implementation of WP-Cumulus, there should be no tagcloud.xml on your server. It’s not in the standard plugin distribution. Yet, Google will try to access it because it is potentially called from the Flash movie, resulting in a 404 “not found” error.

If you’re using something like Google’s Webmaster Tools to keep track of 404′s, you might have seen this error pop up. Rest assured, it’s not a missing file. The flash movie won’t actually call it. Since the plugin provides the tag cloud through flashvars, there’s no need to fall back to the static file.

Option 2: You’re using tagcloud.xml to provide the tags

If your website is “homebrew”, you may be using the tagcloud.xml to actually provide the Flash movie with its data. In this case, there’s nothing wrong with it getting indexed. At least not from a technological standpoint, SEO experts may disagree.

Option 3: A tagcloud.xml exists in error, and is getting indexed

If you’re using one of WP-Cumulus’s many ports to other platforms, you may have a tagcloud.xml in place. Chances are it’s not actually used, and it still has “my” data in it. In this case you really should remove the file from your web server. My website’s statistic indicate that a lot of websites have this scenario in place, and it’s causing a lot of unintended links from those sites to mine.

So, please check if your site has a tagcloud.xml, and whether it’s used. If not, please remove the file. If you’re the author of a port, please see if the file is needed in your distribution, and remove it if not. Thanks!

(image by Gurato)

Just a quick post in case anyone else ever runs into this and manages to find their way to my blog.

I just came across this in a client project I’m working on. I was using a TextField in Flash CS5, and needed to know the width of the actual text inside it for positioning purposes. What I found was that in about 50% of cases, the textWidth property would return zero instead of the strings length in pixels. I tried using autoSize on the TextField and found that it would shorten half of its instances to a single character or less, causing the rest of the line to be invisible.

At first I thought there was something wrong with the font file, but the same happened with Verdana. So I started randomly changing settings, and it turns out that the “anti-alias for readability” setting was causing this. As soon as I changed that setting to “anti-alias for readability” the textfields were being autosized properly, and reported their actual lengths through the textWidth property.

I didn’t really investigate this any further once I found out this workaround. In fact, I needed to use “anti-alias for animation” anyway in my project. Please feel free to comment if this has happened to you, and/or you have more details about this strange little bug.

Recently, I came across discussions on Twitter, and a blog post about ‘hidden links’ in my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Quite frankly, I’m a little embarrassed by this, and I’d like to explain how the situation came to be, and what I plan to change in upcoming versions.

History

When I did the first couple of versions of WP-Cumulus, it was not hosted on wordpress.org. All there was in terms of user support was the comments section of a blog post on this blog. To help people troubleshoot flash plugin trouble, I linked to that post in the alternative or “no flash” content. This content is shown only to user without (the right version of) Flash. It is very common among Flash developers to link ‘home’ this way. I was aware this would also be shown to search engines, but at the time there were only a couple of users. My reasoning back then was that providing a helpful message was important enough to warrant putting the link there.

Whoa, millions of incoming links…

Then, Cumulus started catching on. I moved it to wordpress.org, where it made the top 10 most popular plugins a few times. People were starting to port the plugin to other platforms, and I started getting tons of support requests. Some days, just answering these would take hours. I was overwhelmed. Around the same time, I started noticing an increase of traffic on my blog. At first I thought it was because people were googling for the plugin, but it soon became apparent that there was more going on.

As an unexpected side-effect of the ‘no flash’ link, my blog now had thousands of incoming links, causing it to rank well in Google. Because I sometimes write about things like hosting, advertisers were starting to show interest, and I have to admit I jumped at the opportunity. As time went by, it became increasingly ‘difficult’ to remove the links. Here I was, making a little extra money because of a link I forgot to remove somewhere along the way. But even so, I no longer feel comfortable with the current situation, and have been planning to remedy it for a while.

Future versions

As you may have read on this blog, I’ve been trying to get more people involved in the project. It needs a better programmer than I am to keep it up to date. Unfortunately, this has not proven very easy. As a result, WP-Cumulus 2.0 has been in development for over a year, and one of the things it aims to fix is this ‘hidden links’ situation. I’ve decided that any link in the alternative content should be optional, and disabled by default. And it should probably point to the wordpress.org page instead of this blog. By default, it makes sense to show the regular (html) tag cloud to users without Flash. Version 2.0 will probably do it that way.

I’ll be working on Cumulus 2.0 this week (with one of the best software developers I know, whoohoo!), and I hope to have a rough version some time this month. It’ll put you in control of what is shown to users, search engines and everthing else. As it should have been all along.

There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.

HTML5 isn’t an option just yet

One of the main uses of Flash on the web is video. People keep forgetting however that Flash is also used extensively for other things. It is the only technology available today that allows you to scale, rotated and distort objects. It has a 3D engine (which admittedly isn’t used widely, yet) and it offers the most advanced controls over typography of any tool in a contemporary web designer’s toolbox.

Flash is used in product demos (360 views), simulations, games, data visualizations and many other areas where HTML falls short. Perhaps the upcoming release of HTML5 will allow designers to do the same things without Flash, but until HTML5-supporting browsers are widely adopted, Flash is the (only) way to go. Especially since most of the HTML5 demos I’ve seen have been built using browser-specific (non-standard) functions and were nowhere near a smooth as Flash animation has been since 1996.

And as for video, HTML5 appears to have a long way to go before it can replace Flash as the web’s preferred video player.

There’s no fundamental issue with Flash and touchscreens

This blog post has been getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so. It clearly describes why some currently available Flash content won’t work very well on touchscreen devices like the iPad. However, the types of applications that Flash is often used for, especially games, have always needed different approaches for mouse pointer based devices and touchscreens. Whether they were developed using Flash or not. Flash allows you to accommodate both interaction models, and it’s no problem at all to create touchscreen interfaces in Flash.

Flash is not buggy, slow or overly power-hungry on other devices

Steve Jobs himself has said that Flash on the iPad would kill its battery life. And I’m sure it could. It’s very easy to create a Flash movie that uses every single CPU cycle available on whatever machine it runs on. But like with all other development platforms, that’s just bad programming. Flash is capable of techniques like bitmap caching which can reduce CPU utilization dramatically. And the soon to be released 10.1 version will be capable of outsourcing most of the remaining heavy work, like decoding video, to the systems GPU. Which is probably what the iPhone’s video player does too.

I’ll admit that the current Flash player is slow (by comparison to Windows) on OSX and Linux. It’s obvious that Adobe has not always maintained these players very well. There’s been debate over whether or not Apple is partly to blame for this, but fact is that the Mac version uses ten times the resources the Windows version needs to display the same content.

That being said, on ARM based sytems (like the iPhone and the iPad), things aren’t quite so bad. I get the feeling that many of the users commenting negatively about Flash as a technology are Apple fans who’ve not been getting the performance and stability that Flash delivers on Windows.

A business decision?

I’m convinced that Apple’s ban on Flash is purely a business decision. Allowing Adobe’s technology onto their devices would in turn allow content (music, video, games, etc) to be delivered to the devices without going through Apple’s immensely successful App Store. No matter how much Adobe would improve Flash’s performance and stability, it still wouldn’t make sense for Apple to change their minds. Not with billions of dollars coming in.

On a side note, Adobe has announced that the next major version of the Flash development environment will allow Flash applications to be exported as iPhone apps. So there will be Flash on the iPhone, just not in web pages. For me, the most interesting thing about this is that it will reveal whether Flash is really as bad as Jobs says. I wonder if those apps will drain battery life and crash frequently. If they don’t, that will tell us a great deal about Apple, won’t it?

(Read this post in Belorussian at PC)

The one feature I’ve always wanted to add to WP-Cumulus is true unicode support. Flash player 9 made this impossible because it needed to have the font characters embedded into the movie, and unicode fonts are simply too big for that. But with Flash 10, Adobe has introduced new ways of handling text, and those now allow for non-embedded text to be animated quite smoothly. There’s also no longer any need to specify an exact font name, you can simply tell the player to get a sans-serif font. Flash player 10 is on over 93% of computers now, so it starts to make sense to use it to finally add this long-awaited feature to WP-Cumulus.

I’ve created a test movie (above) that uses these new features, and I’m anxious to find out if it works for you, especially if you’re in Asia, Russia or anywhere else with a non-Latin character set.

What are you seeing?

• Are you seeing all 45 tags (approximately), in many languages?
• Are you seeing your (non-Latin) language?
• Any other issues?
• Do you want me to add your language to the test? Post the language name here.

Please leave a comment below and tell me if the movie works as it should. Thanks!

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.

Snapatar lets you create a new Twitter profile image from your webcam in two very easy steps. You snap a picture, and if it looks right to you you enter your Twitter account details and upload it. That’s all. You can do this as often as you like, there’s currently no API limit for avatar updates. Of course it’s also a great way to create your first avatar if you’re new to Twitter and don’t have one yet.

Two days ago, Snapatar was nothing but a vague notion in my head. I’d thought of it while on vacation, and when I couldn’t find a similar service I decided to see if I could create a proof of concept application. I soon enlisted the help of my PHP guru Bernalyn, and from there things started to really gain momentum. This post is meant to announce the project to the world, and I hope we’ll get some Twitter users to try it. It’s still pretty beta, so we’d love to know what you run into. Please post any errors you come across, suggestions and feedback in the comments.

(Oh and yes, I know I need a better webcam…)

I guess it was about time I updated my Tagnetic Poetry plugin. WP-Cumulus’ lesser known brother now has shortcode support, as well as several other improvements. It’s not as mature as Cumulus, but it’s definitely stable enough to deserve a 1.0 version number.

The Flash movie now has support for the ‘xmlpath’ flashvar that WP-Cumulus has supported for a while now. This affects you only if you’re attempting to use it outside of the context of WordPress, but is very handy if you do. Putting more than one instance of the plugin on a page should also no longer cause issues, and several other little issues were fixed.

Using shortcodes allows you to place TP all over your blog. The parameters allow you to control the way it looks per instance, as opposed to the one set of options the plugin used to have. Those will still be used as defaults, but you can override them if you like by adding attributes to the [tagneticpoetry] shortcode. Here are some examples of how that works:

The new shortcode is all lowercase, but the older [TAGNETICPOETRY] tag is still supported for backwards compatibility. You could in fact add lowercase attributes to it if you’re using WordPress 2.5 or higher, but if you’re going to be editing the page anyway I guess it makes sense to use the lowercase code instead.

Currently, Tagnetic Poetry supports these attributes:

A more detailed blog post on how to use shortcodes is here. The original post about Tagnetic Poetry is here.

A while ago I was asked to do a Flex version of WP-Cumulus. Because I don’t know the first thing about Flex, I failed miserably . But the fun thing about open source software is that anyone with the right skills can pick things up and create the version they need. Carlos Carvalha did just that and did a Flex version for use with Drupal. If Flex is your thing, you can download the files from Carlos’ page. Because this is a ‘modified version’ of my WordPress plugin, it is automatically licensed under GPL, and is thus free for you to use.

Carlos’ blog is pretty interesting btw. Definitely the first blog theme I’ve seen that’s built entirely in Flash.

Lots of people have contacted me, asking for a version of my Flickr widget that they could use on their website, without having to use Flickr (or Picasa). Doing such a version was easy enough, but I was hesitant to release it. The DIY version of WP-Cumulus has yielded more support requests than the actual WordPress plugin, and answering all the email has been taking a lot of my time.

One thing I could have done was to simply release the sources for the Flickr widget. But there’s a lot of Flickr/Picasa specific stuff in there that you would need to take out before being able to hook the movie up to another data source. So that would have made things harder for everyone.

If my understanding of the GPL license is correct, I (as the sole author) am allowed to release different versions under different licenses. Here’s what I’ve decided to do. The Flickr widget will remain closed source, and will also remain a hosted service. The only thing you should have on your website is the code snippet. I’ll happily take care of the rest. Below, you’ll find a download link for Photo widget, Flickr Widget’s new brother, which is licensed as GPL.

Version comparison

Flickr widget	Photo widget
Let’s you display Flickr photostreams or Picasa albums on your website	Let’s you display any images you want
Needs a Flickr or Picasa RSS feed as input	Uses a custom XML format, from a configurable URL
Images are located on either Flickr or Picasa	Images can be loaded from any website, including your own
Clicking an image takes you to that image’s page on Flickr/Picasa	Links and target frames can be set per image in the XML
Available as a hosted service, using a short code snippet	Available for download, including code examples
Up to 20 images shown simultaniously	Up to 20 images shown simultaniously
Closed source, will always be free to use	Open source (GPL)
Available here	Download link below

Please make sure you extract all the files from the zip to one location. They all depend on each other. You won’t need to upload the flash sources folder to your server when deploying the project.

Support

Photo widget is the DIY version of Flickr widget. It offers greater flexibility, but is a lot harder to implement. The XML interface allows knowledgeable developers you to hook it up to all sorts of CMS solutions, and anyone with a basic understanding of HTML should be able implement a simple static version on his or her website. If you’re a beginner working with a WYSIWYG editor, you should probably look elsewhere.

I’ve tried very hard to make the examples as easy as I possibly could. Feel free to contact me if you run into trouble, but I can offer no guarantee I’ll be able to get back to you.

Donations

I looked into making this a commercial product for a long time. The main reason I didn’t was because that would have meant I’d have to protect the movie from being decompiled and I’d have had to deal with things like keeping track of payments. And I had no idea what a reasonable price would be. While one user might use it as a small gimmick on a personal blog, another might make it the main interface on a large commercial website.

If your project falls in the latter category, please consider donating. I’ve spent a lot of time developing this, so you don’t have to.

Talk about picking a poor name for this project. I first considered giving it a catchy name, but decided to simply call it ‘Flickr widget’ becaused that best describes what it does. But then I found that Flickr itself has a Flash widget too. And now I’ve made it support Picasa feeds too, so the name doesn’t make any sense anymore.

The upside is of course that Picasa users can now use the widget to show off their favorite albums on their websites. It accepts the feeds from your ‘My Photos’ page and album pages. If you, like me, have only a couple of albums under ‘My Photos’, the feed from that page will only show the album covers, so it makes more sense to use an album feed (on the left is a trip to the zoo with my daughter in 2007). Like with Flickr, the total number of thumbs shown is limited to 20.

Fortunately, Google uses a very similar feed format to Flickr, so I was able to put support for both into one Flash movie. Please feel free to try it, and let me know if you run into anything.

Get the widget here