Silverfisk

4 comments by Silverfisk on Feb 3rd, 2010 digg this super bookmark

Tutorials, tutorials, TUTORIALS!

It's what I've been working on the last few days. Mostly behind the scenes, here you will get to know what I've been doing.

In every tutorial article I have here on ModDB I have a list that links to all the other tutorials I have here. Now I have around ten tutorials here on ModDB, this would mean that every time I would have to add ten links, and that would increase with every link I added. If I wanted to change the look of the list, I would also need to do a LOT of work.

So around week ago I decided to do something about it, I spoke to Jeff from Wolfire Games about this and he suggested I make a Flash widget to replace my link list that I could embed from an external source (since I can't use PHP here on ModDB).

The work commenced, I actually had a working version running after 4-5h of work, that includes me learning ActionScript 3 (I did have the basics of programming down before I started) and finding, downloading and installing an IDE (Integrated Development Environment, I used FlashDevelop).

After that I decided to Flashify the footer on my tutorials as well, this would allow me to do lots of awesome stuff with it, as well as update it much easier. I highly recommend ActionScript 3 for its ease to use.

This is just the beginning though, I have a lot of features planned, the first one to add would be creating automatic listing of the tutorials. Right now it just displays some HTML, I need to get that info down to a format I can easily use when coding to create automatic lists.

I will also add support for different categories of tutorials and in the distant future, tutorial features and cool bling stuff.

Got any ideas for cool features you would like to see?