flash (macromedia): ANN: Community MX Week in Review 093004 -- flash (macromedia)

ANN: Community MX Week in Review 093004

Bill Horvath .:CMX:.
10/1/2004 5:55:48 PM

flash (macromedia):

Community MX has yet another great group of articles and an extension for
you this week:

Indexing a Database Table

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=A7339

Tom Muck

Indexes are one of the most important aspects of database design, yet one of
the most underused in web applications. A database index can speed up a
query by hundreds or thousands of times. Imagine, for example, if the phone
book was not alphabetized and you had to find a name. It would takes hours
or days to find a name. This is exactly the kind of inefficiency that a
database with no index has to contend with. The article will show where to
put indexes.

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Do You Want To Do That With CSS? - Centering a Wrapper [FREE]

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=A8BBA

John Gallant, Holly Bergevin

This article will deal with one of the most basic problems encountered when
developing a tableless design, namely getting a fixed width "page wrapper"
element to center at all window resolutions and in all modern browsers.
We'll review what a wrapper is, explain how to center it, and then discuss
how to get IE5.x/Win browsers to cooperate. Finally, we'll touch on a little
Gecko-based problem with the method, and ways to overcome that, as well.
Join us.

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Welcome to Florida: The Plywood State

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=60FF2

Kim Cavanaugh

After Hurricane Frances became the third storm to hit Florida this year
there were all sorts of cartoons and re-worked images floating into my Inbox
at work. One of my favorites was a map of Florida covered with pieces of
plywood and with the caption "Welcome to the Plywood State". I thought it
would be a good exercise to recreate that faux postcard, and this tutorial
shows you how to use Fireworks to do just that. This tutorial contains five
video demos.

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Graphical Clock in Flash MX - Part 1

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=6A6D8

Derrick Ypenburg

Using the Date class in Flash, you can retrieve the current date and time
from the user's computer. By manipulating the time values, we can apply them
to still and motion graphics to re-purpose what a clock can look like.

As mentioned above, we will be using the Date class in this article. The
Date class can be used to do more than just retrieve the time and date from
a users machine. Time and dates can be referenced for timing in games,
tracking time between events, creating countdowns to events and whatever way
you'd like to manipulate time and dates. In this article, we will be
focusing on retrieving the hours, minutes and seconds from the users
computer using the Date class, and we will use these numbers to graphically
represent the time.

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Semantic (X)HTML Markup: Blockquote, Q, and Cite

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=B71D3

Zoe Gillenwater

(X)HTML contains three semantic elements you can use to mark up text on your
web page that comes from or names an external source: blockquote, q, and
cite. Although blockquote is widely (and, very often, wrongly) used across
the web, q and cite are relatively unknown and underused. The fourth article
in the Semantic (X)HTML series introduces these elements, teaches you when
and how it's appropriate to use each, and discusses browser shortcomings in
the support of these tags so you can be sure you're using them in a way
that's cross-browser compatible. You'll also learn how to use CSS in
conjunction with these elements to produce unique visual styling.

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Fundamentally VB.NET: Part 5 - Conditional Branching

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=5C4F4

Val Tobin

In Part 1of this series, you were introduced to VB.NET built-in data types.
In Part 2, you learned how to create variables for these data types. Part
3in this series on VB.NET taught you about Enumerated Constants, what they
are and how to use them. Part 4 discussed the operators at your disposal.
This article, Part 5 in the series, will cover Conditional Branching using
If...Else and Select Case.

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Meeting With Clients

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=1A15C

Adrian Senior

This is a tale with a beginning, and not a lot more. I would like to see the
rest of it come to fruition; only time will tell. This is a blow-by-blow
account of me pitching for a job. This can be one of the hardest things to
do in this business, and pricing can be near impossible.

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CMX Clean Up Attribute Extension for Dreamweaver

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=6DC96

Paul Boon

CMX Clean Up Attribute allows the user to clean up (remove/clear) an
attribute from all elements within the current document.

Example:

Remove would remove the class attributes from all tags/elements in the
current document currently assigned a class atribute.

Clear simply removes the value assigned to all class attributes from all
tags/elements assigned a class attribute, so class="avalue" becomes
class="".

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WebQuests for Teachers - Part 2 - Reconstructing [FREE]

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E67DD

Sheri German

In the first part of this series, we introduced the WebQuest and a bit of
its history. We learned that this lesson in a Web page allows students to
make safe use of Internet resources. We also discussed the six sections that
make up a traditional WebQuest, and how the WebQuest should be more than
mere fact-finding. Finally, we looked at the completed version of the "Time
Machine MTV" WebQuest that we're going to reconstruct from scratch. The
moment to do that is now upon us, so let's get started.

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Using the Singleton Design Pattern in Flash

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=92139

Danny Patterson

Design patterns are standardized solutions to solving common programming
problems. The Singleton design pattern is one of the most widely known
design patterns; and it's also one of the simplest. It's used to insure that
a class is only instantiated once. The pattern also provides a global point
of access to the sole instance of the class.

This article explains how to use the Singleton pattern within Flash and it