I’ve now completed the arduous task of migrating all of my old blogs into a single, new, and sexy WordPress blog . I had posts all the way back to December 2003, using both “Old” Blogger, and LiveJournal. This involved backing up my LiveJournal, and exporting to XML, and then using the WordPress importer. Then for Blogger, I had to temporarily switch my hosting to blogspot instead of my ftp, and then use WordPress’s importer for Blogger. With all of those posts and comments finally in one place, I was then able to work on styling things up, and putting together a new look for the site. So other than going back and giving some of my old posts proper titles, and doing a little tagging, I should be all set. If anyone sees anything awry, let me know. For anyone else that may have to accomplish the same task, I couldn’t have done it without:

• Moving Blogger To Wordpress
  
• LJArchive

Now time to finish packing for my vacation to San Francisco - Krissy’s already there, ready to make her presentation tomorrow at the SIOP Conference. After her sessions are over, our trip will take us around the city, to a night excursion to Alcatraz, a tour to Muir Woods, and then we’ll be renting a convertible to drive down the Pacific Coast Highway down to Los Angeles. It should be a fantastic time.

yum.

I’m going to MAX!
This will be the first time I’ve attended a professional conference, and I’m very excited to meet some of my peers in the Flash community and get all I can from the seminars. Really cool stuff like Next Gen ActionScript, Art of Encoding Video, and Advanced CSS. I can’t wait. The Flash 8 authoring software in Studio 8 is awesome and it’s going to be really cool to see what other people are doing with it.

Well I dove headfirst into some Flash programming this weekend and came out with a success. Now I know this is probably not the most efficient way, correct way, or best way to do this, but it got my XML parsing chops up, and I learned how to tap into the Amazon API while creating it. I’m stoked at the result.

What it’s doing is it’s taking my last played song’s Album Title and Artist Name (thanks to Audioscrobbler/last.fm) and sending it along to Amazon as a keyword search. Amazon then gives back an XML file with the results, and then my Flash app parses the XML and finds the node with the CD cover that matches the keyword’s search results. So if you look over there in the sidebar, you’ll see that the cover appears as it would show on Amazon. Pretty neat huh?

And here’s the code, if any Flash junkies want to see what I was working on. If you have any questions about it, email me or hit me up on IM. I still have to add something if there is no image available, and maybe try another service (Google, AllMusic) if Amazon comes up short.

// Allow this Flash app to show the loaded images consistently from the remote server, images.amazon.comSystem.security.allowDomain("http://images.amazon.com");////var audioscrobblerURL = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/rdf/history/[YOURPROFILENAMEHERE]";var audioscrobblerReply_xml:XML = new XML();audioscrobblerReply_xml.ignoreWhite = true;audioscrobblerReply_xml.onLoad = function(success) { if (success) {  //  trace(audioscrobblerReply_xml);  processAudioScrobblerXML(audioscrobblerReply_xml); } else {  trace("error loading"); }};audioscrobblerReply_xml.load(audioscrobblerURL);function processAudioScrobblerXML(audioscrobbler_xml) { audioscrobblerArtistTitle = audioscrobbler_xml.firstChild.firstChild.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.firstChild.firstChild; trace(audioscrobblerArtistTitle); audioscrobblerAlbumTitle = audioscrobbler_xml.firstChild.firstChild.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.firstChild.firstChild; trace(audioscrobblerAlbumTitle); // set the standard Amazon URL var amazonURL = "http://webservices.amazon.com/onca/xml?Service=AWSECommerceService&SubscriptionId=[YOURDEVIDHERE]&Operation=ItemSearch&Keywords="; var urlEnd = "&SearchIndex=Music&ResponseGroup=Images"; var keyword = audioscrobblerAlbumTitle+" "+audioscrobblerArtistTitle; // create new XML var amazonReply_xml:XML = new XML(); // ignore the whitespace amazonReply_xml.ignoreWhite = true; // trace the returned XML and process it amazonReply_xml.onLoad = function(success) {  // trace(amazonReply_xml);  if (success) {   processXML(amazonReply_xml);  }  error = "error loading"; }; // send off the URL to pull back the new XML data from Amazon (note variable "keyword" comes from textfield on stage) amazonReply_xml.load(amazonURL+keyword+urlEnd); // create the function of processing the returned XML function processXML(amazon_xml) {  // amazon_xml is now a reference to the XML  // object where information is stored  // trace(amazon_xml.firstChild.firstChild.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.firstChild);  albumCoverURL = amazon_xml.firstChild.firstChild.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.nextSibling.nextSibling.firstChild.firstChild;  //load CD Cover image into movieclip on stage  imageHolder.loadMovie(albumCoverURL); }}

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Extended Edition, has been released.

The Extended Edition will add an additional 50 minutes to the film, bring the total for the Extended trilogy to 11 hours and 20 minutes.

wow.
That’s a lot of movie to watch.