Things aren’t quite right just yet

So, revisiting this site since the last work on it over Thanksgiving vacation . . . and it’s now Christmas Vacation. This doesn’t bode well for site updates.

Re-worked the fonts for the sIFR plug-in. For some reason, certain punctuation was not working in Agency FB font - such as apostrophes, pound signs, and ampersands. The font has those characters, and re-exporting a new .swf didn’t help either.

I reverted back to the Flash MX, and re-swf’ed a few fonts. I also visited some .swf font locales online - notably Fontsmack and Isarie. While the title graphic above (”Agent Flynn”) is in the Armor Piercing font, it doesn’t convert too well to sIFR. I had also liked the looks of BankGothic MD BT (too wide), Dirty Headline, Misproject, and Zalamander, but none worked that well. Headline One also looked promising, but had both spacing and punctuation issues.

And of course the sIFR doesn’t work in IE7, but does in IE6. Arrgh.

Posted by Andrew Flynn on December 22, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Tags: Browser Compatability, Fonts, sIFR, wordpress

Well, I guess now it’s time to add some content

Now that the majority of the Andrew Flynn website is up and running, now I guess it’s time to enter some good ol’ content. Although this blog will cover a range of topics, this first non-”Hello World!” post will detail what I’ve gone through just to get to this point.

Theme: As you can see, I’ve installed the Vertigo Red three-column theme by Brian Gardner. I think it works pretty well.
Font: I added the custom font to blank graphics provided in the theme. That’s the “Armor Piercing” freeware font above.
Plugins: Next I installed the Google XML Sitemap plugin, as well as activated the Askimet Spam plugin, both of which required a few hoops. I then worked on installing a Netflix plugin, so readers can view my queue, but wasn’t thrilled with the end result, so I deactivated. The change font size widget in the footer was then added.My last two plugins work - sort of:
The FlickrRSS plugin works, but does not display the photo titles or descriptions (even though both are populated in the RSS feed). I posted a question to the developer’s forum, but it may be a week before it’s answered - and the answer may be “it’s not available.” In IE (both 6 and 7) there’s a blue image link border that’s not in Firefox that I know has been solved, so I just need to implement.
Finally, the sIFR plugin worked very well - although there’s always some tweaking. I tried using the Armor Piercing font for the h2 tags in the sidebar and footer, but some odd spacing and the italicized font kept the left half of the first letter was cut off - similar to the Microsoft Arial capital “W” when starting a line. Adding a space prior to each use of the font wasn’t really practical. So I went with Agency font - an old standby. In fact, sFIR creator Mike Davidson uses Agency on his Mike Industries blog. Howver, and it’s getting late to do an investigation, it does NOT work in IE7. At all. Perhaps that’s because I’m using old Flash MX which outputs Flash 6 files. This was after installing 400MB of the Flash CS3 30-Day trial, and then not getting it to launch. At all. So I went with the old one from 3 PC’s ago - I even had to copy it over from my 2003 laptop. Ugh. Anyway, the plugin uses sFIR 2.x, and 3.x is the new 2.x, and probably handles IE7, but I’m going to bed.

Netflix Update: Grindhouse: Planet Terror arrives tomorrow.