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10.3.8
Today we were given the brief for the project, the brief outlines some requirements for the website itself such as the requirement to use it to document progress on our various projects during the year. I have so far decided to take a menu element I was developing for my personal website and use it in this case.

So far the main thing I want is a dynamic website. This means that the menu structure etc, should be loaded from an XML file and the entire websites images and pictures etc can be loaded externally. This has the dual advantages of making the main website pretty small, and making the website easy to update.

So far I am just changing the names of the pages in the current site, sketching and thinking out the structure for the new site, and looking up ways of externally loading information.

The structure for the site will be easy to navigate, and for this reason I want to use tree style menu's with about three tiers. The reason for this is that the interface can appear clean, yet still contain alot of options. Also most operating systems use tree style menus so the system should be natural for most users.

I want to use a blog style for most of the areas of this website, this means that I will have to update several different areas of the website on a regular basis. This is another reason for wanting to use externally loaded html+xml. Having a database would further ease the workflow, especially if I create a website where I can load into more than one blog simultaneously.

11.3.8
Today I focused mostly on the menu system. I found a skin for the v2 style tree component that worked well, I then created the menu nodes in XML using the map I sketched out and wrote down.

This evening I discovered that actionscript2 and actionscript3 were creating some major conflicts with the project (I had things I wanted that included both) Sadly Adobe stopped supporting the tree component when they created Cs3, which is a major hindrance for my project. Despite this I updated the coding for my slide menu to as3 and included a custom tweener component that requires far less code and has some advanced effects. The code also looks much cleaner now.

Among the tutorials I found online were some nice toys including using the filter tools on frames in a movie. What this means is that I can introduce animated effects using the filter tools within flash. In this case the blur tool. How it works is to take a print screen of each frame, apply the filter to it and then redraw it on the existing frame. This creates a nice liquid fire type of effect. My current idea is to make the title image more dynamic by having a streaming version of this away from wherever the cursor is on the screen.

The style of the website is becoming an interesting problem. I have already decided that I want the image gallery to full screen before showing the image, so the image can be displayed at a better resolution. But I want the format to be quite small to appear neat. I also have quite a simple style at the moment but have created it in a way that means I can add style elements later on. Also v3 elements are easier to skin than v2 (pity about the tree component!).

12.3.8
My main concerns today are getting the content in place, So I intend to use a simple XML menu and CSS/html methods I developed last year on my portfolio website to start uploading the content while making use of the new tags available in cs3. Once the main website content is in place I will start looking for ways to improve it such as a dynamic blogging page, passworded section, mp3 players, dynamic colour schemes etc.

13.3.8
After wrestling with actionscript 3 for a couple of daysI decided to take a different approach to loading content, to get around the null error I placed the text loading script in the images_mc movieclip (inappropriately named, it is infact the entire website content_mc). I then created a separate sliding menu for each of the three main sections. the main issue right now is having submenu items using the current menu system. But now I have a handle on as3, dynamic content is the next main step.



14.3.8
Today I am starting to deal with the website content, including loading external .html and css into a movie clip, so far everything is fine except that the website content only loads after the button has been clicked twice. This seems like one of those problems that is going to make the whole thing much harder to do. Hopefully just loading the URL information from an external source will make the problem go away!



18.3.8

Having worked on the website problem for the last few days I am now at the point where I can load external CSS and HTML formatted text dynamically into a text frame. I have also learned enough code to dynamically create text fields and other elements at runtime. This could prove useful if i choose to load content purely dynamically as opposed to into set frames on the stage. My new problem is that the scroll bar refuses to work. So today I am writing up content so I have less to do when i've figured out how to solve the other problems. The next steps in-so-far as I have though of them are mainly creating sub menus, coding an image gallery and cleaning up the interface slightly.

26.3.8
Finally and with a great lack of documentation my website is finished. Most of the last few days has been tweaking xml files and resizing images on photoshop so that's not too important. Apart from that I fixed numerous minor issues on the website, but there are still a couple still to go!