Adam Petrie - Freelance Web Developer

Developing for Modx outside of the Manager

Today I’m going to explain how to get your templates out of the Manager and into the editor of your choice. Thanks to a single snippet I have been able to increase my productivity with Modx by 10,000 times (approximately.)

Controlling Post Thumbnails with PHP

With the introduction of post thumbnails in WordPress 2.9 I was intrigued to see how I could use them to my advantage on the carousel for my portfolio. This article describes a specific issue I ran into and will hopefully help anyone else with the same problem.

ActionScript 3 EBook

In February of 2009 I wrote to Shawn Rubel of Flasheezy.com inquiring about the possibility of writing tutorials for his site. After a few email exchanges between us, the prospect of writing a series of tutorials turned into the idea to write a short ebook that would serve as a thorough introduction into AS3. The result of that idea came to life today as Flasheezy.com has officially launched Stepping Into ActionScript 3 – The Complete Guide for Easy Migration from AS2 to AS3.

Subclassing Event in AS3

I encountered an error yesterday while I was working on a seemingly simple piece of code. Considering that I should have been able to spot the error right away but didn’t, I figured I would write it down for future reference.

I was using a subclass of Event and I was getting type coercion error every time I forwarded an event to a different listener. Considering the code was nothing new, I was quickly stumped, but it all came down to a very simple mistake.

Creating Photo Galleries in WordPress

Sometime ago I set out to create a photo gallery with WordPress where I could upload photos, comment on them and link between without the use of any plugins. This post is a step by step guide of how you too can add this functionality to your blog.

Working with AMF in ActionScript 3

For anyone not aware, Action Message Format (AMF) is a data transfer format that allows you to make remote service calls with ActionScript. The ability to speak to external servers from within Flash or Flex allows you to develop much richer applications. For instance you could use AMF in conjunction with a CMS to load in dynamic content every time your Flash movie plays. The Slide Show widget that I have previously showcased, makes extensive use of AMF to load in settings for the application (colors, behaviors etc.) as well as the content that will be displayed. In this tutorial I will show you the basics of AMF including how to make calls and handle successful and erroneous results.

Action Script Best Practices

I was recently asked to debug a Flash website that was created for a friend of a colleague. After some discussion, I determined that overall, there wasn’t more than an hour or two worth of work to be done. Unfortunately once I actually got my hands on the .fla file, I realized that the developer [...]

IOErrors And The VideoPlayer Class

Recently we decided to allow custom transcoder profiles into our widgets. Prior to this change, I had simply hardcoded the extensions used for various versions of a single piece of media. I would call for the media’s URL and then append the correct extension to receive the file I was after. Adding in the custom [...]

Applying ColorTransforms && Filters to a MovieClip

Here’s one worth remembering: In ActionScript 3.0 you cannot apply a ColorTransformation and a Filters Array to the same MovieClip. Actually, that’s not entirely true. You can apply both to a MovieClip and you won’t receive any compile or runtime errors but applying the ColorTransform Object will nullify any filters you already have or are [...]