Digitor

As a visual man of a certain age I have grown up with flash – the visual side and not programming. I approached actionscript like that red kite I remember not wanting to come and be photographed (kicking and screaming (with claws!)). However in times past I did have to write a little action script – an interactive cd demanded buttons that knew where to go when pressed and when to play this movie or that. I also remember batch files and msdos, so thinking about it, I have touched a programming of a sort.

When I was asked to build a cms website I was lucky as I was working in the voluntary sector and someone else was asked to do it with me. Google had been invented as well! The other chap was very keen at the start and came up with a variety of options. We agreed Drupal was a headache, companies were wanting £1000′s for cms and blogs not customisable enough. He found a Microsoft open source codeplex project and the downloadable my web pages starter kit which has a very custom able skin file that accepts html I understand and style is controlled by cms, which is easy. Because of the drip drip effect of my past programming experience I could get my head around this, while the other chap found himself too busy to spend the time needed to get any sain head round this kind of stuff.

As I have said before I have developed many websites using this cms system and was able to adapt it to include membership logins and connect it to a members database, (www.vanetwork.co.uk) and all clever things like that. Not much programming from me though but a lot of google, reading and copy and paste. The skill is knowing what to copy and paste and where.

Artists have asked for fading slide shows on their pages and I have resorted to my old friend called flash to implement them like this at www.sculpturelogic.co.uk.

Now that is ok until the customer wants to change the images. They don’t have a flash editor or the skills to create a new slide show. The main idea of cms is that once designed I can leave the customer in control of the content and pics. So now I’ve been playing with getting javascript to work with the cms and be easily editable by the end user (with a little training) and no software except access to the website needed.

I knew I could copy and past some javascript into html blocks in the cms – I did it for the members page at the www.vanetwork.co.uk site. This was a self contained block of code that I was able to cut and paste into the right parts so it worked well enough.

Recently looking for simple slide show examples the best ones had code blocks that referred to external javascript files. I could not get this system to work at all. I tryed to place the files in this place or that but the page code wouldn’t or couldn’t find them. Then I tried pasting the code from each of the 3 files into 1 html black and hey it worked — cool and am now trialing it on www.jleventon.co.uk site so she can easily upload images in the cms and then easily add links to the image in the html block.