Invention has many mothers. Aside from necessity, which we get from the old saying, there is also thrift, boredom, sloth and efficiency.

I wrote my first CMS (content management system) tool in 2002 using Visual Basic 6.0. I wanted to maintain a blog, but did not want to use one of the popular blog hosting sites that used banner adds. I also wanted control over how I skinned the site, and archived the stories. I wanted to host it on my ISP’s free static hosting, and wanted control over this data should I move it to another hosting solution.

My solution was to build a series of templates that would represent portions of the blog page. This would include the header, footer, navigation, and repeating items such as the stories, and links in the navigation. The repeating items had field variables that would be populated from an Access database. No need for speed. The final HTML would be spit out into static pages, and FTPed up to the site for viewing friends and relatives. (more…)

The Web acts as a gateway to an immeasurable amount of resources and information. However, the main access point for all of these sites are a relatively small number of sites – the bottlenecks and watchdogs for Web content - search engines. So, as a Flash Developer, one of the first questions you learn to fear is, “How will this Flash content show up in search results?” Flash is, unfortunately, by and large invisible to search engines - which is a major detriment to the growth potential of the technology. And although the best answer is to provide an alternative HTML version of the content, any programmer worth his salt will go out of his way to avoid having to do repetitive labor. So, here are a few tricks we’ve picked up along the way.

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