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Today I’m going to show you how to do something a little more fun than usual. We’re going to be making a simple particle system in Flash CS3.

Example Files

fun_with_particles.zip

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Watch me do my best Bob Ross impression while teaching you how to create a preloader in Actionscript 3. No happy trees included.

Download the example files here. Video after the jump!

There are several ways to embed Flash on a web page - some are better than others. Here’s the one we’ve found to work best:

First, you’ll need to go to the SWFObject home page to download the javascript. You can also read up on SWFObject here. The example html included inside the zip file should be enough for you to figure it out, but in case you have a short attention-span (like me); I’m going to walk you through it, step by step.

Earlier this morning, Ian sent me an email saying that the Portent Website code was great. Near perfect, even! But one thing was weighing on his mind. We weren’t passing the W3 Markup Validation. That giant red “THIS SITE ISN’T XHTML TRANSITIONAL!” message was searing into his poor SMX-addled eyeballs and I was the closest thing to Visine he could find. I coded this website myself, so I was set on the task of figuring out what exactly was wrong with the code and how I could fix it. But does validation even matter? The page displays correctly for the end user, right?

Why validation matters

We can’t all be valid. Even some top blogs don’t pass validation, including Boing Boing, Seth Godin’s blog and Engadget. Viewing these sites as they are now, the errors aren’t noticeable. Validation exists purely for code junkies and obsessive compulsive XHTML producers. You know, like me. Validation is all part of the grand unification project of the W3C, standardizing code on the web for maximum accessibility. Standards in code are good. Standards in code preserve the sanity of your coders. Anyone who has tried to update old outdated code on a website will agree; if we all just decided on how we were going to use this powerful stuff we call hypertext markup language to begin with our lives would have been easier. Validation exists to ensure your website is future-proof.

I loathe the term “web 2.0”. I think catch phrases are easy and unimaginative, and calling the recent boom of easy to use and engaging websites “web 2.0” seems to cheapen them. It sounds too trendy.

It sounds like there will be a “web 3.0” and that “web 2.0” will become obsolete once we get bored of it. There’s a lot of new ideas on this old Internet, and they will keep coming as we continue to collaborate and refine the process in which we disseminate our data.

Innovation: Separate style from content

One brilliant revelation in coding for the web in recent years has been the separation of style from content. Gone are the days of using tags for presentation, now we utilize CSS to create styles that are easily swappable and flexible enough for our plastic Internet. Today I am going to show you a simple and attractive way to add flair to important links, while preserving the ideal of separating style from content.