SlideShowPro News

06.28.07 | External Navigation Demo updated

Silly me. When I recently refreshed the various demo FLAs available through the user area, I accidentally updated the "Custom Navigation Demo" with an older version which didn't include the looping-playback functionality I added a while back. The demo has been updated once again, and has changed names to "External Navigation Demo" to avoid confusion with swapping out navigation elements inside the component itself.

06.09.07 | Video demo ZIP updated

I neglected to save one of the FLAs in the Video Demo I posted yesterday as a Flash MX 2004 document (it was saved as Flash CS3, which was impossible to open in older versions of Flash), so I resaved the FLA and uploaded a new ZIP. Grab it again if you had trouble with it.

06.08.07 | Downtime

Wow, that was fun! 24 hours after this site mysteriously vanished from the interweb, it's finally back. So WTF happened?

At around 4pm Thursday afternoon, the site wasn't loading. I contacted the support department of our web host (Dreamhost) and was informed that there was "ghost data in the DNS" for our site, and that it was being cleared out. Site should be back up shortly, they said.

By last night, it still hadn't come back up. So I contacted them again. They replied that they experienced a failure while working on their router, which was necessary because of their recent security problems you may have read something about. With that, I went to sleep, thinking surely it'll be up in the morning.

But no. This morning it was still down. So I contacted Dreamhost again, and received the exact same response about "ghosts in the DNS." In other words, a template answer. I called them out on it, and the issue was then elevated within their support system.

At noon today, someone finally got on the stick and figured out the problem. The unique IP for this site wasn't in a subnet that was used by our server. The subnet previously used was likely moved. So they had to issue a new unique IP for the domain.

If you've ever moved a domain from one site to another, you know what that means. A 24-48 hour wait for the updated DNS info to fully propagate.

I'm obviously thankful that Dreamhost was able to get the site back up and running again, and their support staff really is a great bunch of people. They're always courteous, helpful, and fast when responding to my inquiries. But it's not enough to keep Dreamhost as the web host for this site.

With that, in the coming weeks we'll be moving everything to a new web host. It'll be a pain, no doubt about it. But for the security of our users, not to mention this frustrating downtime that had a sizable impact on our bottom line as a business, we need to be hosted elsewhere.

We'll be getting out of the shared hosting environment all together and going dedicated. It'll give us room to grow, not to mention the level of control and uptime we need.

Would I still recommend Dreamhost? For someone looking for a space to put up a personal blog or small site, sure. I've had an account with them since 2001, so I have years of experience working with them. Truth is, they're hard to beat considering how much they offer as part of their hosting plans. But we're running a business here, that thousands of people depend on. It's time for us to move on.

I'll post more when information becomes available.

(Pssst -- scroll down. Other news came out today.)

Two new demonstration files

In addition to releasing a new update for SlideShowPro, I've also created two new demonstration files for users to check out.

The first is a refreshed video demo. After hearing about problems some SlideShowPro users were having when trying to load video into SlideShowPro, I decided to revisit the old "Sin City Demo" and update it to work with the latest version of SlideShowPro. This time around, the demo loads more than one video, and cross-fades the audio in addition to video as you click between numbers in the navigation. This should help give those "bleeding-edge" users an idea of how they can load video in their slideshows. You can preview the video demo here.

(Note: Technically, SlideShowPro was not designed for loading video, so it's still not a supported practice. But it can work.)

Second, by popular request, a new demo that shows how to call methods in SlideShowPro through HTML links. It requires a bit of Javascript to facilitate interaction between the SWF and the HTML document embedding it, but for intermediate web developers it should be fairly straightforward. The Customization Guide (available in the new 1.5.3 update) has a new chapter devoted to this topic.

To download the source files for both of these demos, login to your profile, click on the "SlideShowPro" link, and on the next page scroll down to see the demo download files.

SlideShowPro 1.5.3 Released

The latest version of SlideShowPro, version 1.5.3, is now available for everyone to download.

This is a bug-fix / usability update release that tackles a number of issues that popped up since 1.5.0 came out. To read up on what's new, check out the version history. To download the update, login to your profile and click on the "SlideShowPro" text link to go to the product download page.

06.04.07 | To slideshow, or not to slideshow

As ridiculous as it sounds, for the past couple of years I've struggled with a seemingly benign, yet annoying as all hell editorial conundrum. That is, is it "slideshow" or "slide show"?

Fact: "slideshow" is not a word. It's a modern concatenation of two real words that should always be written with a space between them.

It may not sound like a big deal, but consider how often these words are written throughout this web site, our help documentation, in our application UIs, etc., etc. It's everywhere. And in nearly every instance, I've used the proper spelling.

But what does Google have to say? Type "slide show" into Google, and right off the bat you get "Did you mean: 'slideshow'." No, actually I didn't, but Google thinks I made a mistake. Not a good sign.

How about search results? If you search for "slide show" (without quotes) you receive 132 million results. Sounds great, but those include any mention of "slide" or "show" -- not necessarily the two words together. Refine it to the exact phrase (by wrapping it in quotes) and you get about 28 million. That's a big drop. Okay, but what about "slideshow"? 82 million. In other words, people are nearly 3 times more likely to type the concatenated, incorrect spelling into Google.

So who's right? If I were to ask an English professor or newspaper editor, I'm sure they'd side with me and go with "slide show." But from an SEO perspective, it only makes sense to write your copy to match up with what the majority of potential customers are using.

Incidentally, at the time of this writing, this site comes up as the #5 natural search result when searching for "slide show" in Google, and #8 for "slideshow." Not bad. But could we do better by standardizing on "slideshow"? Almost definitely.

It still bugs me, but hey -- we're working our butts off to grow a business here, and the last thing I'd want is to handicap our growth in any way over a spelling quibble. So I'll bite my tongue and resist the urge to click the space bar from now on.

Mob rule!