
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! TODCon 2007 Announced For the few who haven't experienced it yet, TODCon is the most informative yet informal Adobe-related event you're going to find. Whether you're a seasoned veteran of Macromedia products or just starting out, you will have a great time learning a great deal from many knowledgeable speakers about CSS, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, Flash, Central and even about running your business properly. Those who attend usually end up coming back every year because of the unique and informal atmosphere. You don't want to miss out on this event. This year, TODCon will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada. We predict that this year's turnout will be even bigger than last year's. You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event. Hurry, so you can get the early bird registration fee. Adobe Doesn't Like Manipulation Adobe is letting their conscience show by committing to developing software that will detect when an image has been digitally manipulated. The software could also match a photo to the camera that shot it. There have been several stories in the papers lately where the accompanying images were changed in order to create a different impact on the reader, and this software, should it be employed by newspapers and magazines, could limit this kind of tomfoolery. Dave Story, vice president of product engineering at Adobe, says that if Adobe creates a product that allows digital image manipulation to occur, they should help prevent the abuse that can occur as a result. Read about it at Wired.com. Microsoft Changes Tune: "Please Steal From Us!" Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes isn't happy about piracy, but he understands that there is a certain benefit to having people pirate their software. If you read this article at InformationWeek.com, it would seem he has a pretty healthy attitude toward the piracy issue. His basic take is that if someone downloads a pirated version of Windows, and that person likes the software, they might like it enough to buy it. It's difficult to put out any statistics on the validity of this line of thinking, but it makes a certain amount of sense. It's not unlike the theory behind trial versions of software, where the software manufacturer hopes that once someone tries their software, they'll rush out and buy it once the trial has ended. But most pirated software doesn't expire, and that's where it gets a bit more complicated. YouTube Changing Their Name To YouSued! Viacom, who own cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike TV and BET are suing the proverbial pants off of YouTube. The price tag is a cool one billion dollars. That's not chump change. Many folks think that YouTube's business model has been flawed from the start, and has been ripe for a huge lawsuit from day one. Viacom's intellectual property has long been feeding YouTube's website, without any kind of acknowledgement, monetary or otherwise. Being sued was bound to happen, and if Viacom wins, which is not unlikely, it will set quite a precedent for YouTube, who have thus far been able to get away with displaying whoever's content they wanted to without fear of any serious repurcussions. More on this at FoxNews.com. New CMX Extension Paul Davis, one of the Community MX Extensioneers, has created the CMX Font Size Changer Extension. This is one handy tool as it allows your website visitors to easily change the font size on your page to fit their needs. It's simple to use, and can make quite an impact on your visitors, especially those concerned with accessibility. Check it out at CommunityMX.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks Jim--great tutorial and easy to follow. The timing on presenting this tutorial was perfect. I can put this to use right away." - Richard H., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Tom Green's Adding Flash Video to Dreamweaver 8 article. Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!
Great Quotes: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein Seagate Starts Building a Better Security Blanket Seagate is one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives, and is approaching the way we look at the data on those hard drives in a whole new way. Everyone's used to their data being secure. In the office, you typically have to log into Windows, and unless someone knows your password, you thought you were safe. But if someone steals your hard drive, they can get whatever data they want. But Seagate is making it so that in order to see any data on a hard drive, you would have to authenticate yourself first. That means that before Windows even boots up, you'd have to prove that you're the person that is allowed to see the data on the disk. Interesting approach, and many corporations - some of whom have probably been burnt by loss of data resulting from stolen computers, are probably keeping a close eye on what Seagate is developing. See what it's all about at CNN.com. Honey... Oh, Sugar Sugar If Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptops take off, that old Archie's tune would make for a good backing song on their advertisements. Negroponte has been working on these $100 laptops for quite a while, and is finally releasing them to children's schools in developing nations. The laptops can be "cranked" manually in order to generate power, and is powered by "Sugar", a user interface that is as innovative as it is geared toward specific users - children. Read up at MSNBC.com. Allow. Yes... Allow. Allow. Oh, jeez. Allow! ALLOW! Forget It. One of the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials from Apple pokes fun at Vista's new security engine that some feel is a bit imposing, as it asks for permission for programs to carry out tasks that Windows never cared about before Vista came along. Stephen H. Wildstrom wrote an article at BusinessWeek.com that speaks to the possible pitfalls of Vista's increased security. He says that this "feature" in Vista could cause a lot of folks to simply turn off Vista's security tools, leaving them wide open to attacks that Vista was trying to prevent. We hope that's not the case, but he makes a good argument for Microsoft possibly coming up with an alternative to what many perceive as "pain." Bad Cell Phone Pics? Read On... Getting good quality photos from your cell phone is no simple task. Most cell phones are only 1 megapixel, or slightly higher in some cases. If you want to improve the quality of those pictures, head over to the Digipedia Blog to find some tips like avoiding the digital zoom and keeping your lens clean. Big OS X Update Apple has released the Mac OS X 10.4.9 Update. You can read about what it addresses here, and download it here. It's a pretty huge update, as it affects everything from bluetooth to networking, to iChat and a whole ton of other stuff. If you're running an Intel-based Mac or a PowerPC-based Mac, you'd be wise to update.
CMX Get Put All Open Extension for Dreamweaver Maybe you're working on a set of files and you want to make sure you're editing the latest live versions. Or perhaps you find yourself working with quite a number of related files. When you're done, you have all the files opened and need to upload them all to the live server. You could just select each one in the Files panel (Site panel in DWMX), and upload them individually, or you could use the Select Recently Modified command to upload the files. If you've only worked on one set of files today, you could try the Select Newer Local and wait for ages as Dreamweaver compares every file in your site against the remote file modification date. Take a look at this Extension by Danilo Celic
Fun and Freebies! No Insult Intended, But It Turns Out That Your Skin Is Your Largest Organ OK, we admit it. After looking at this DiscoverMagazine.com article entitled "20 Things You Didn't Know About... Skin", we didn't know about any of these fun skin facts. I mean, who knew that "the skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather"? Not us... Hey- We Still Like Your Parents, No Matter What This Article Says Your parents mean well, but they probably aren't as tech-savvy as you might like. Chances are, you're the one they call when they experience (usually self-inflicted) computer woes. Unless your parents are local, it's difficult to just head over there and help them fix any problem that might occur. Check out John Bigg's article at CrunchGear.com to find out how you can wean your folks off of your techiness. Freebie? More Than A Million Of Them. If you want access to over a million free stock photos, check out EveryStockPhoto.com.
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1 In this series you will build a simple administration area complete with a control panel that will allow you to manage the content of your website. The system you will build is aimed at the small business website where one or two users will have total control of the website's content. This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing CMX Font Size Changer Extension Paul Davis Change the font size on your webpage with the JavaScript code from this handy extension. Enter the font sizes you want and then click OK, everything else is done for you ... it really is that easy! Patterns and Textures [FREE] Thierry Lorey Thierry Lorey has been a Fireworks enthusiast since version 3 and is now Fireworks Zone’s webmaster, Fireworks beta tester and author for Community MX. He is the first European Fireworks enthusiast to write an article for Fireworks Developer Center. After some translation and training jobs, he is now the full-time Fireworks Zone's webmaster. His job includes writing news, tutorials, creating graphics, and maintaining and developing the website to keep the content new and fresh. In Fireworks, a texture, also called a seamless texture, is designed to be repeated and applied to an a vector object on a percentage basis from 0 to 100%. Fireworks includes a collection of about 50 standard textures you will find on your hard disk at: Program Files > Macromedia (or Adobe) > Configuration > Textures . They usually come in bitmap formats: PNG, GIF TIFF, BMP, or JPEG and are therefore not editable. In this article we will see how Fireworks' built-in textures can be used and customized, be it bitmap or vector textures by: Modifying the intensity of texture applied Enabling the transparency property Combining textures and patterns Selecting colors The application to strokes The inversion of textures The textures being turned into patterns Creation of a style from a texture Flash PowerTools: Exploring Gradients [FREE] Joseph Balderson Out there in the Flash design and development world, there are many tools available to assist in creating projects. These are "power tools" that supercharge the task of designing, coding, compiling, testing and documenting, allowing you to save time and present ideas much more effectively. Some have been around for a few years, and some are pretty new. This series highlights some of the open source tools and techniques which have made my life as a Flash developer much more effective. Implementing code-generated graphics or animations can be greatly facilitated with the aid of an "explorer," showing a live example of certain effects, and the code required to create the effect at runtime. This can greatly expedite code generation, and provide an essential learning tool. In this article we'll look at two very handy utilities for exploring code-generated gradients: Kinglong's "Flash Gradient Fills Explorer" and Andreas Weber's Gradient Tween Editor. Kinglong's "Flash Gradient Fills Explorer" and Andreas Weber's Gradient Tween Editor Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 2 Tom Muck Spam, spam, spam, spam. Spammers have taken over the Internet and made it a horrible place to maintain a web site. Spammers have gone beyond simply spamming your email account -- now they are spamming blogs and guestbooks, spamming trackbacks, and spamming signup forms. Even a child's home page with a guestbook for friends is not safe from links for cialis, porn, or web hosting. Obviously these spammers are getting some return from their criminal activity, because they keep doing it. Unfortunately, you can't reach through the computer screen and grab them by the throat to strangle the life out of them. All you can do is put in place some safeguards and try to minimize the attack. Part 2 in this series shows how you can record the IP address of the spammer and block access to your site to that computer in the future. Once again, I'll assume you have familiarity with PHP or ColdFusion basics (databases, inserting and displaying data) and HTML forms. The Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion Series: Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 1 Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 2 Coloring Your World - Part 1: Color Basics [FREE] Derrick Ypenburg Part of our job as professional communicators is to work with color every single day, whether it is starting from scratch to create a unique logo and color scheme for a client, sending a multitude of colors from a website out to the world, or ensuring a Pantone color match is adhered to. I love color and I thought it was time to discuss the basics of color for those of us who struggle with it, don't quite understand the basics, or are just stuck in a rut. As well, I luckily work with a print designer as my business partner, so I've come to learn about bringing the world of print and multimedia together and would like to share that with you on a basic level as well. In this first part of a three part series, let’s go through the color basics. The Coloring Your World Series: Coloring Your World - Part 1: Color Basics Coloring Your World - Part 2: Two Worlds of Color -Digital vs. Print Coming Soon Coloring Your World - Part 3: Color Trends and Possibilities Coming Soon Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 4 Zoe Gillenwater In the Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout tutorial series, you've learned how to structure your XHTML and build your CSS to create a layout made up of stacked bands of color. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to allow the bands in either the fixed or fluid versions of the layout to vary from each other in width. You can even mix fixed and fluid within the same layout with the changes outlined in this tutorial. The Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout Series: Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 1 Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 2 Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 3 Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 4 Working with the Camera Class - Part 4: Subscribing to a Live Stream Robert Reinhardt In this "Working with" series, you learn how to use the Camera class in Flash Player. The Camera class has been available in Flash Player since version 6, yet many Flash designers and developers don't know much about it. The Camera class gives you access to the user's webcam, to do everything from publishing a live video stream to detecting movement in the camera frame. In this tutorial, you learn how to use the NetStream.play() method to receive a live video feed from a Flash Media Server application. NOTE: In order to follow along with the tutorials in this series, you should have a webcam compatible with Flash Player 6 and higher. Just about any USB or Firewire webcam works with the Flash Player. SPECIAL OFFER: The first twenty readers of this tutorial series to send me an e-mail via the feedback link on this tutorial will receive a free time-limited Flash Media Server account at Influxis. You can use this account to publish live video streams. Please allow one to three days for me to verify your subscriber (or pay per use) status with Community MX. (There are still accounts available as of March 8th, 2007!) The Working With the Camera Class Series: Working with the Camera Class - Part 1: Viewing Live Output Working with the Camera Class - Part 2: Detecting Motion Working with the Camera Class - Part 3: Publishing a Live Stream Working with the Camera Class - Part 4: Subscribing to a Live Stream The Mobile Internet - Part 5: Sniffing for Operating Systems Adrian Senior In this article we look at some of the problems we have come up against and investigate how we can check the UA string to send our users to the correct site version based on whether they are using a desktop operating system or not. The Mobile Internet Series: The Mobile Internet - Part 1: An Introduction The Mobile Internet - Part 2: Image Display & Filtering The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser The Mobile Internet - Part 4: Text Elements The Mobile Internet - Part 5: Sniffing for Operating Systems Blowing Stuff Up in After Effects Tom Green Blowing up planets and graphics in Flash is extremely difficult to accomplish without a Master-Level of Actionscript competence. After Effects makes this quite easy to accomplish and, in fact, it can be kind of therapeutic! Approximate download size: 12.8MB The AS3 Event System: Part 1 - The Basics [FREE] Steve Schelter AS 3 brings a new level of sophistication in scripting for flash with a unified event model system. In the first installment of this series, we'll be covering the basic principles of registerring listeners and handling event objects.
Cool Pie Charts While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring. In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :) Check out the Article by CMX Partner Gordon Mackay
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner. Fiddling With Text In Fireworks When adding text in Fireworks, you can hold down the CTRL key (PC) to toggle from the text tool to the move tool, enabling you to reposition your text box without having to manually choose the Pointer tool. Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

TODCon 2007 Announced

For the few who haven't experienced it yet, TODCon is the most informative yet informal Adobe-related event you're going to find. Whether you're a seasoned veteran of Macromedia products or just starting out, you will have a great time learning a great deal from many knowledgeable speakers about CSS, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, Flash, Central and even about running your business properly. Those who attend usually end up coming back every year because of the unique and informal atmosphere. You don't want to miss out on this event. This year, TODCon will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada. We predict that this year's turnout will be even bigger than last year's.

You're invited to register for this fantastic, one of a kind event. Hurry, so you can get the early bird registration fee.

Adobe Doesn't Like Manipulation

Adobe is letting their conscience show by committing to developing software that will detect when an image has been digitally manipulated. The software could also match a photo to the camera that shot it. There have been several stories in the papers lately where the accompanying images were changed in order to create a different impact on the reader, and this software, should it be employed by newspapers and magazines, could limit this kind of tomfoolery. Dave Story, vice president of product engineering at Adobe, says that if Adobe creates a product that allows digital image manipulation to occur, they should help prevent the abuse that can occur as a result. Read about it at Wired.com.

Microsoft Changes Tune: "Please Steal From Us!"

Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes isn't happy about piracy, but he understands that there is a certain benefit to having people pirate their software. If you read this article at InformationWeek.com, it would seem he has a pretty healthy attitude toward the piracy issue. His basic take is that if someone downloads a pirated version of Windows, and that person likes the software, they might like it enough to buy it. It's difficult to put out any statistics on the validity of this line of thinking, but it makes a certain amount of sense. It's not unlike the theory behind trial versions of software, where the software manufacturer hopes that once someone tries their software, they'll rush out and buy it once the trial has ended. But most pirated software doesn't expire, and that's where it gets a bit more complicated.

YouTube Changing Their Name To YouSued!

Viacom, who own cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike TV and BET are suing the proverbial pants off of YouTube. The price tag is a cool one billion dollars. That's not chump change. Many folks think that YouTube's business model has been flawed from the start, and has been ripe for a huge lawsuit from day one. Viacom's intellectual property has long been feeding YouTube's website, without any kind of acknowledgement, monetary or otherwise. Being sued was bound to happen, and if Viacom wins, which is not unlikely, it will set quite a precedent for YouTube, who have thus far been able to get away with displaying whoever's content they wanted to without fear of any serious repurcussions. More on this at FoxNews.com.

New CMX Extension

Paul Davis, one of the Community MX Extensioneers, has created the CMX Font Size Changer Extension. This is one handy tool as it allows your website visitors to easily change the font size on your page to fit their needs. It's simple to use, and can make quite an impact on your visitors, especially those concerned with accessibility. Check it out at CommunityMX.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks Jim--great tutorial and easy to follow. The timing on presenting this tutorial was perfect. I can put this to use right away."

- Richard H., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Tom Green's Adding Flash Video to Dreamweaver 8
article.

Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!

Great Quotes:

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein

Seagate Starts Building a Better Security Blanket

Seagate is one of the largest manufacturers of hard drives, and is approaching the way we look at the data on those hard drives in a whole new way. Everyone's used to their data being secure. In the office, you typically have to log into Windows, and unless someone knows your password, you thought you were safe. But if someone steals your hard drive, they can get whatever data they want. But Seagate is making it so that in order to see any data on a hard drive, you would have to authenticate yourself first. That means that before Windows even boots up, you'd have to prove that you're the person that is allowed to see the data on the disk. Interesting approach, and many corporations - some of whom have probably been burnt by loss of data resulting from stolen computers, are probably keeping a close eye on what Seagate is developing. See what it's all about at CNN.com.

Honey... Oh, Sugar Sugar

If Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptops take off, that old Archie's tune would make for a good backing song on their advertisements. Negroponte has been working on these $100 laptops for quite a while, and is finally releasing them to children's schools in developing nations. The laptops can be "cranked" manually in order to generate power, and is powered by "Sugar", a user interface that is as innovative as it is geared toward specific users - children. Read up at MSNBC.com.

Allow. Yes... Allow. Allow. Oh, jeez. Allow! ALLOW! Forget It.

One of the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" commercials from Apple pokes fun at Vista's new security engine that some feel is a bit imposing, as it asks for permission for programs to carry out tasks that Windows never cared about before Vista came along. Stephen H. Wildstrom wrote an article at BusinessWeek.com that speaks to the possible pitfalls of Vista's increased security. He says that this "feature" in Vista could cause a lot of folks to simply turn off Vista's security tools, leaving them wide open to attacks that Vista was trying to prevent. We hope that's not the case, but he makes a good argument for Microsoft possibly coming up with an alternative to what many perceive as "pain."

Bad Cell Phone Pics? Read On...

Getting good quality photos from your cell phone is no simple task. Most cell phones are only 1 megapixel, or slightly higher in some cases. If you want to improve the quality of those pictures, head over to the Digipedia Blog to find some tips like avoiding the digital zoom and keeping your lens clean.

Big OS X Update

Apple has released the Mac OS X 10.4.9 Update. You can read about what it addresses here, and download it here. It's a pretty huge update, as it affects everything from bluetooth to networking, to iChat and a whole ton of other stuff. If you're running an Intel-based Mac or a PowerPC-based Mac, you'd be wise to update.

CMX Get Put All Open Extension for Dreamweaver

Maybe you're working on a set of files and you want to make sure you're editing the latest live versions. Or perhaps you find yourself working with quite a number of related files. When you're done, you have all the files opened and need to upload them all to the live server. You could just select each one in the Files panel (Site panel in DWMX), and upload them individually, or you could use the Select Recently Modified command to upload the files. If you've only worked on one set of files today, you could try the Select Newer Local and wait for ages as Dreamweaver compares every file in your site against the remote file modification date.

Take a look at this Extension by Danilo Celic

Fun and Freebies!

No Insult Intended, But It Turns Out That Your Skin Is Your Largest Organ

OK, we admit it. After looking at this DiscoverMagazine.com article entitled "20 Things You Didn't Know About... Skin", we didn't know about any of these fun skin facts. I mean, who knew that "the skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather"? Not us...

Hey- We Still Like Your Parents, No Matter What This Article Says

Your parents mean well, but they probably aren't as tech-savvy as you might like. Chances are, you're the one they call when they experience (usually self-inflicted) computer woes. Unless your parents are local, it's difficult to just head over there and help them fix any problem that might occur. Check out John Bigg's article at CrunchGear.com to find out how you can wean your folks off of your techiness.

Freebie? More Than A Million Of Them.

If you want access to over a million free stock photos, check out EveryStockPhoto.com.

Let's Learn ColdFusion: Building a Simple Admin - Part 1

In this series you will build a simple administration area complete with a control panel that will allow you to manage the content of your website. The system you will build is aimed at the small business website where one or two users will have total control of the website's content.

This free article by CMX Partner Adrian Senior can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

CMX Font Size Changer Extension

Paul Davis

Change the font size on your webpage with the JavaScript code from this handy extension. Enter the font sizes you want and then click OK, everything else is done for you ... it really is that easy!

Patterns and Textures [FREE]

Thierry Lorey

Thierry Lorey has been a Fireworks enthusiast since version 3 and is now Fireworks Zone’s webmaster, Fireworks beta tester and author for Community MX. He is the first European Fireworks enthusiast to write an article for Fireworks Developer Center. After some translation and training jobs, he is now the full-time Fireworks Zone's webmaster. His job includes writing news, tutorials, creating graphics, and maintaining and developing the website to keep the content new and fresh.

In Fireworks, a texture, also called a seamless texture, is designed to be repeated and applied to an a vector object on a percentage basis from 0 to 100%. Fireworks includes a collection of about 50 standard textures you will find on your hard disk at: Program Files > Macromedia (or Adobe) > Configuration > Textures . They usually come in bitmap formats: PNG, GIF TIFF, BMP, or JPEG and are therefore not editable.

In this article we will see how Fireworks' built-in textures can be used and customized, be it bitmap or vector textures by:

Modifying the intensity of texture applied
Enabling the transparency property
Combining textures and patterns
Selecting colors
The application to strokes
The inversion of textures
The textures being turned into patterns
Creation of a style from a texture

Flash PowerTools: Exploring Gradients [FREE]

Joseph Balderson

Out there in the Flash design and development world, there are many tools available to assist in creating projects. These are "power tools" that supercharge the task of designing, coding, compiling, testing and documenting, allowing you to save time and present ideas much more effectively. Some have been around for a few years, and some are pretty new. This series highlights some of the open source tools and techniques which have made my life as a Flash developer much more effective.

Implementing code-generated graphics or animations can be greatly facilitated with the aid of an "explorer," showing a live example of certain effects, and the code required to create the effect at runtime. This can greatly expedite code generation, and provide an essential learning tool. In this article we'll look at two very handy utilities for exploring code-generated gradients: Kinglong's "Flash Gradient Fills Explorer" and Andreas Weber's Gradient Tween Editor.

Kinglong's "Flash Gradient Fills Explorer" and Andreas Weber's Gradient Tween Editor

Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 2

Tom Muck

Spam, spam, spam, spam. Spammers have taken over the Internet and made it a horrible place to maintain a web site. Spammers have gone beyond simply spamming your email account -- now they are spamming blogs and guestbooks, spamming trackbacks, and spamming signup forms. Even a child's home page with a guestbook for friends is not safe from links for cialis, porn, or web hosting. Obviously these spammers are getting some return from their criminal activity, because they keep doing it. Unfortunately, you can't reach through the computer screen and grab them by the throat to strangle the life out of them. All you can do is put in place some safeguards and try to minimize the attack. Part 2 in this series shows how you can record the IP address of the spammer and block access to your site to that computer in the future. Once again, I'll assume you have familiarity with PHP or ColdFusion basics (databases, inserting and displaying data) and HTML forms.

The Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion Series:
Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 1
Anti-Spam Measures for PHP and ColdFusion - Part 2

Coloring Your World - Part 1: Color Basics [FREE]

Derrick Ypenburg

Part of our job as professional communicators is to work with color every single day, whether it is starting from scratch to create a unique logo and color scheme for a client, sending a multitude of colors from a website out to the world, or ensuring a Pantone color match is adhered to. I love color and I thought it was time to discuss the basics of color for those of us who struggle with it, don't quite understand the basics, or are just stuck in a rut. As well, I luckily work with a print designer as my business partner, so I've come to learn about bringing the world of print and multimedia together and would like to share that with you on a basic level as well.

In this first part of a three part series, let’s go through the color basics.

The Coloring Your World Series:
Coloring Your World - Part 1: Color Basics
Coloring Your World - Part 2: Two Worlds of Color -Digital vs. Print Coming Soon
Coloring Your World - Part 3: Color Trends and Possibilities Coming Soon

Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 4

Zoe Gillenwater

In the Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout tutorial series, you've learned how to structure your XHTML and build your CSS to create a layout made up of stacked bands of color. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to allow the bands in either the fixed or fluid versions of the layout to vary from each other in width. You can even mix fixed and fluid within the same layout with the changes outlined in this tutorial.

The Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout Series:
Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 1
Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 2
Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 3
Create a Horizontal Band CSS Layout - Part 4

Working with the Camera Class - Part 4: Subscribing to a Live Stream

Robert Reinhardt

In this "Working with" series, you learn how to use the Camera class in Flash Player. The Camera class has been available in Flash Player since version 6, yet many Flash designers and developers don't know much about it. The Camera class gives you access to the user's webcam, to do everything from publishing a live video stream to detecting movement in the camera frame. In this tutorial, you learn how to use the NetStream.play() method to receive a live video feed from a Flash Media Server application.

NOTE: In order to follow along with the tutorials in this series, you should have a webcam compatible with Flash Player 6 and higher. Just about any USB or Firewire webcam works with the Flash Player.

SPECIAL OFFER: The first twenty readers of this tutorial series to send me an e-mail via the feedback link on this tutorial will receive a free time-limited Flash Media Server account at Influxis. You can use this account to publish live video streams. Please allow one to three days for me to verify your subscriber (or pay per use) status with Community MX. (There are still accounts available as of March 8th, 2007!)

The Working With the Camera Class Series:
Working with the Camera Class - Part 1: Viewing Live Output
Working with the Camera Class - Part 2: Detecting Motion
Working with the Camera Class - Part 3: Publishing a Live Stream
Working with the Camera Class - Part 4: Subscribing to a Live Stream

The Mobile Internet - Part 5: Sniffing for Operating Systems

Adrian Senior

In this article we look at some of the problems we have come up against and investigate how we can check the UA string to send our users to the correct site version based on whether they are using a desktop operating system or not.

The Mobile Internet Series:
The Mobile Internet - Part 1: An Introduction
The Mobile Internet - Part 2: Image Display & Filtering
The Mobile Internet - Part 3: Background Images & A Different Breed of Mobile Browser
The Mobile Internet - Part 4: Text Elements
The Mobile Internet - Part 5: Sniffing for Operating Systems

Blowing Stuff Up in After Effects

Tom Green

Blowing up planets and graphics in Flash is extremely difficult to accomplish without a Master-Level of Actionscript competence. After Effects makes this quite easy to accomplish and, in fact, it can be kind of therapeutic!

Approximate download size: 12.8MB

The AS3 Event System: Part 1 - The Basics [FREE]

Steve Schelter

AS 3 brings a new level of sophistication in scripting for flash with a unified event model system. In the first installment of this series, we'll be covering the basic principles of registerring listeners and handling event objects.

Cool Pie Charts

While Fireworks has a tool for creating pie charts I find that the resulting two-dimensional chart is more often than not quite dull and boring. In this tutorial I will show you how to spruce up your pie charts and transform them into attractive graphics that will look good on any page. It's really very simple, so let's do it already. :)

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Gordon Mackay

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Jim Babbage, CMX Partner.

Fiddling With Text In Fireworks

When adding text in Fireworks, you can hold down the CTRL key (PC) to toggle from the text tool to the move tool, enabling you to reposition your text box without having to manually choose the Pointer tool.

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!