I finally got the new main gallery page up and running! Please check it out when you get a chance. Just click on the “Gallery” link above. The flash movie to the right is an example of the same thing. It basically loads all the thumbnail images for a particular gallery into a flash movie and lets you scroll up and down to look at each one. When you find one you like and click, it takes you to that gallery and pulls up that image. Freakin’ cool!
This was one of the hardest projects I’ve done so far. I used AMFPHP to bring MySQL data into a flash movie that I generated using PHP. I had to use action scripting, MySQL, PHP and the flash remoting all together! YUK! But as I always say, I guess it was worth it… This is something I’ve been wanting to do for about a year. I’ve worked on it here and there, never with success until now. 
This will open up a lot more possibilities to use flash in my site. I’ve been steering away from it because I couldn’t load data into the swf files dynamically. But that problem is now solved with AMFPHP. I tried using the XML methods that seem to be so popular these days, but I found them to be pretty slow and clunky. This flash remoting stuff seems to be pretty snappy, so I think it’s pretty useable. The only thing that still concerns me with flash is search engine caching, or lack thereof. If I embed movies I’ll certainly be trying to find ways to load the rest of the pages with keywords. There are still some bugs with that gallery page that I’m going to work out, but I thought it was good enough to put up now. I hope I have some time to develop more content using this method.
