Just a quick note, but I have changed hosting providers for my weblog. The transition should be pretty seamless, and if you are reading this, then you are all set. It might take a day or two for the DNS to update.

The weblog is now being hosted by MediaTemple. They were one of the partners of the on air tour, and hosted the website. They gave us excellent support, and thus when I started to look for a new host, they were the first people I contacted.

The transition should be pretty smooth, but if you run into any issues, just leave a comment on this post.

Well, Ted Patrick and I launched video.onflex.org a little over 3 weeks ago, and we are already nearing our twentieth video on the site. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure to glance through some of the videos.

Anyways, we are nearing the end of our backlog of videos, and it looks like I have some time this Thursday and Friday to create some more videos, so:

What Flex and / or Apollo videos you want to see on video.onflex.org? What do you want us to show? Who do you want us to interview?

Let us know by posting your thoughts in the comments.

One of the new plugins we installed on the new weblog server is the Quickcode plugin for Moveabletype This is a simple plugin that uses bracketed tags to make it easy to mark up posts.

Instead of typing:

<a href="mailto:mesh@macromedia.com">mesh@macromedia.com</a>

I can type:

[email]mesh@macromedia.com[/email]

The syntax is easy to use, which is the main reason I installed it.

Once I began using it, I realized it would be useful to create a number of other tags, so I opened up the plugin file (written in Perl) and hacked around until I got some new tags working. I wanted to post them here in case anyone else found them useful.

Here are the new tags:

[mxna]TERM[/mxna] - Links the term for a search at the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA)

[google]TERM[/google] - Links the term for a search at Google

[wikipedia]TERM[/wikipedia] - Links the term for a search / link at wikipedia

[url2]TERM[/url2] - Links the included URL, with the URL as the link.

Here are some examples:

This searches for [mxna]mesh[/mxna] at MXNA.
This searches for [google]Mike Chambers[/google] at Google.
This search for [wikipedia]Macromedia Flash[/wikipedia] at wikipedia.org.
This creates a link to my new weblog at [url2]http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/[/url2]

To install these, [url=http://mt-stuff.fanworks.net/plugin/quick_code_version_10.phtml]download and install[/url] the quickcode.pl file. Open the file in a text editor, and search for the following lines inside of the maincode sub:

$s =~ s![email](.*?)[/email]!<a href="mailto:$1">$1</a>!gis;

Insert the following lines after the line above:

$s =~ s![mxna](.*?)[/mxna]!<a href="http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/index.cfm?searchterms=$1">$1</a>!gis;

$s =~ s![google](.*?)[/google]!<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=$1">$1</a>!gis;

$s =~ s![wikipedia](.*?)[/wikipedia]!<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=$1">$1</a>!gis;

$s =~ s![url2](.*?)[/url2]!<a href="$1">$1</a>!gis;

Save the file. Now when you make a post using Quickcode formatting, you can use the new tags.

If you can think of any useful tags to create, post them in the comments.

As you have probably noticed, my weblog has moved from markme.com to weblogs.macromedia.com.

The new url is:

http://www.mikechambers.com/mesh/

Make sure to update your urls for the site and the rss feeds.

Christian Cantrell’s weblog has also moved, and eventually all of the weblogs on markme.com will be transitioned over.

The biggest changes are that the site has a new look (although not necessarily good). I tweaked the default templates, so they don’t look so hot, but I am going to try to spiff it up some over the coming weeks.

The other big change is that we are using a new spam controll system, which should hopefully reduce or eliminate weblog spam.

Finally, we have tried to redirect everything from markme.com, but there are probably quite a few links and posts still broken. So, if you find any errors, you can just post them in the comments here.

Updated : April 23, 2007 to point to new domain.

As I mentioned yesterday, we have released an small update to MXNA (our Macromedia Community News Aggregator).

In addition to a bunch of tweaks and bugs fixes, there are some cool new features, including:

• New Per-Feed Feed Reports / Summaries (very cool)
• New Last Day Most Popular Averages Report
• Listing of most popular posts from last year
• Listing of most popular posts of all time

If you have a weblog aggregated by MXNA, then I think the new feed specific report is the coolest new feature. They allow you to view click stats for the last fifty posts made on a per feed basis. This makes it easy to see what types of posts were the most popular, what your average clicks are, and what the current trends are.

You can view a report for a specific feed by going to the Weblogs listing page, and clicking the Feed Report link for the feed you want to view.

Congrats to the winners of yesterdays quick contest, who noticed the new features:

• Nisse Bryngfors (Click Reports)
• Galileo (Clicks Icon)
• Ryan Guill

Bonus points to Galileo, who won the most perceptive award by noticing that the clicks icon for each post had been slightly changed to include a fill color.

If you are one of the winners, send me an email (mesh@macromedia.com) with your mailing info, and Ill send out your Flash bags today.

We just uploaded a mini release of the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. There are some cool new things in there, but instead of telling you what they are, Christian and I thought it would be fun to have a quick little contest.

So, the first 3 people to post in the comments describing one of the new features / changes to MXNA will win a Flash Timbuktu Messenger bag (these are sweet). Make sure to include a URL pointing to the new feature / change, as well as your email address (so I can contact the winners). Once a feature / change has been posted in the comments it cannot be reused.

Btw, If you were one of the people that Christian and I pinged last night showing off some of the new features, then you are not eligible (sorry).

You can view the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA) here.

As Christian just posted, we have added a new section to the MXNA 2 beta. The new section is titled Reports, and lists all of the reports and analytics available at MXNA.

The report / charting mini-apps are built using the Flex Framework, and are then compiled into SWF. The ColdFusion page they are contained within dynamically passes info into the chart to configure default parameters. The charts and graphs are created using the components built into the Flex framework, and get their data from the MXNA web service API. When the user clicks on a chart item, Flash calls out to the containing HTML page, and a Javascript function uses some AJAX to load context sensitive posts into the HTML page. All without having to refresh the page.

We started this as a way to experiment with the Flex framework, and Flash / AJAX integration, and have been really happy with the results. By leveraging Flash and AJAX together, we can take advantage of the strengths of both Flash/ Flex (interactivity, ease of development, experience) and HTML (easy layout and formatting, displaying large amount of text based data), and ultimately provide an over all better user experience. Plus, if the user is using a browser that does not support AJAX, you can still view the data within the charting app.

Anyways, we are going to try to make another post with more detailed technical info on how the reports are put together.

You can view all of the reports here.

Btw, these reports are a lot of fun to make (we have two more about ready to launch), so if you have a suggestion for a specific report, please send it mxna@macromedia.com.

One of the biggest problems we have had with MXNA (or any aggregator) over the past year or so is that they are primarily category based, and not content / conversation based. So, if a weblog is in the Flash category, and someone posts about what they had for breakfast, then that will appear in the Flash category.

While, this is not always a bad thing, as it allows you to get a feel for the people in in a particular community, it can lead to problems. One, it can make it harder to find the latest information being posted about Flash (or whatever category), as the category may contain a lot of off topic posts. Two, and as we saw during the past year, when the posts are about controversial or incendiary topics, then it can just annoy people trying to find info about the category. Finally, it omits relevant posts that are made by feeds in other categories (i.e. someone in the ColdFusion category makes a post about Flash).

The Macromedia XML News Aggregator 2 (MXNA) beta that we launched yesterday helps solve this problem with a new feature that we call Smart Categories. In short, Smart Categories are categories based on the content of the post, and not the category.

This means that if anyone being aggregated makes a post about Flash, then it will appear within the Flash Smart Category. This makes it incredibly easy to follow all of the latest thoughts and conversations about a particular topic.

The other cool thing about Smart Categories is that we can quickly add temporary ones to help track hot topics. So, if you check out MXNA, you will notice that there is an MXNA Smart Category, which allows you to quickly see what everyone is saying about the MXNA beta.

I think that the addition of Smart Categories is the single most useful addition to MXNA, and I have found that I am finding posts and information that I would have missed before.

Oh yeah, we also have RSS feeds available for all of the Smart Categories. You can find those on the RSS Feeds page. We will also be adding RSS links to each individual Smart Category and Category page.

Of course, when you want to get a feel for a particular community, you can still view posts by the traditional categories.

You can view the MXNA beta here. You can find more information about Smart Categories here.

Have any suggestions for new Smart Categories? Post them in the comments.

As Christian Cantrell posted earlier, we have just released a public beta of the next version of the Macromedia XML News Aggregator (MXNA 2).

This version was re-written from the group up with performance and extensibility in mind. While there are already a ton of cool new features, the thing I am most excited about is that we now have a solid platform that we can quickly build on top of and add new features.

First thing to note is the new URL:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/

If you have links pointing to MXNA on markme.com, you should update them to use the new URL.

We updated the web service API. It now has a cleaner interface, and provides a lot more information. You can find more information on it a here. The old web service API still works, but has been deprecated. If you have an application that relies on it, you should consider updating it to use the new API.

We also have added the ability to generate custom RSS feeds that you can aggregate or use to build your own applications. This is actually pretty powerful and essentially creates an alternative to the web service API. You can find more information on generating RSS feeds from MXNA here.

If you would like to have your weblog and / or feed added to MXNA, you can submit it here. Note, that MXNA now supports all languages. If your language is not listed, just send us an email at mxna@macromedia.com

Finally, if you have a weblog and have a ping url for MXNA, you should change the domain in the url from www.markme.com to weblogs.macromedia.com. We will eventually automatically redirect URLs, but we are not doing that yet.

We have created a temporary smart category for MXNA, which you can use to see what everyone is saying about the new version of MXNA. You can view it here.

I will post some more information on some of the new features later today. In the meantime, you can check out the new version of MXNA here.

We have made a ton of new Macromedia XML feeds available in order to make it easier for everyone to keep up with the latest news, technotes, articles and other information from Macromedia.

Here is a list of some of the products covered:

• Breeze
• Central
• ColdFusion
• Contribute
• Director
• Dreamweaver
• Flash Communication Server
• Fireworks
• Flash
• Flash Player
• Flash Remoting
• Flex
• FreeHand
• JRun

You can find out more information, as well as view all of the feed URLs from:
http://www.macromedia.com/go/rss_info

Christian also has some additional information on the feeds here.

You can also keep up with all of the feeds in the Macromedia category at MXNA.

Btw, big thanks to Christian Cantrell who basically put the entire project together.