Monthly Archives: December 2008

Personal website or blog: that is the question

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I’ve been pondering from quite some time whether there’s any reason for me to have a personal website and the blog or simply the blog. Last year, when I’ve started this blog, I had in mind to create my own personal website (in Flash of course) that I would fill with all sorts of stuff. A year has passed and… nothing… I didn’t really have the time to think at my site, let alone to start working on it. Naturally, I started wondering if I would really need a site since the blog could cover all the topics I want. I could have a page with all my personal projects, a page for Flash/Flex/Air resources, maybe even a photo gallery and all this in the blog itself. So I could just concentrate on shaping and customizing my blog instead of creating a personal site from scratch. I mean, the blog is already there. It’s all set up. All I have to do is come up with some nice design (that I could even find ready-made on the Internet) and simply add all the information I want to share… easy as that. Plus, the entire back-end is already in place.

Right now, I think today is much easier to set up a personal website based on a blog, than to create your own site from scratch. Of course you could just purchase a website template, but that would need more tinkering since it usually doesn’t fit one’s needs. So, finally, I took the decision to drop the idea of a personal website and instead just have some sort of welcome page that would redirect to the blog itself and do my magic on the blog. Hopefully I’ll have some spare time to create that welcome page in the next year :)).

Create Flash banners without Flash

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Today JumpeyeComponents launched a new web application called BannerSnack that lets anybody easily create Flash banners and publish them. The product is still in its beta stage but most of the features are already implemented and working. All you have to do to create a Flash banner is to create your account on BannerSnack, access the application from the website and start using it.

By using a free account, you can create, save and publish your banners without problems but there are a few limitations in comparison with the premium account:

Free account Premium account
you can only choose from a limited number of banner sizes you can create custom size banners
you do not have access to all the setup parameters of the animations and filters you can fully customize the animations and filters
you have a limit of 25 MB of storage space for your images you have a 250 MB storage space for your images

All these limitations are gone if you purchase a premium account, which costs from $9 per month up to $149 per year.

The application itself is easy to use and has a fairly intuitive interface. The banners are based on a slide like structure with different types of transitions between them. You can use text and images for your banners on which you can apply different show/hide animations and filters. These filters and animations are based on the FlashEff engine, so you can use many of the eye-catching animations possible only with FlashEff.

Once you finished your banner, you can save it in your account and then publish it to the web. You can even set the banner to be public, which means other users will be able to access and edit it. Of course, their changes will not reflect in your banner, they will be saved separately.
But enough talking… I mean writing… For more information you can simply access www.bannersnack.com to check it out and to start using the banner maker application. There’s even have a short video presentation of the features of BannerSnack and you can also read a blog about a interesting stuff on marketing and banners (I’ve already subscribed to this blog… you should too).