Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce our new Flash CS4 video tutorials are finally ready! It only took me a year to get Santo (the author of the video tutorial course) to finally do it – better late than never I suppose.

… I have to tell you, wrangling up good video authors is like herding cats!

Check out this sample video on using the Flash Bones tool:

You can find more sample videos on the Flash CS4 video tutorial home page and in this coming months Web Designer Magazine.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Hi,

Today, the Web is a much more sophisticated place (dynamic shopping carts, blogs, DOM scripting, Ajax etc) … a Web that requires much more sophisticated web designers. To be a competitive and modern web designer these days, you have to learn more than just HTML and CSS .

The ‘foundation’ languages of web design today are:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. Javascript
4. PHP

You don’t have to become a full-fledged nerd coder but you should at least understand the basic concepts and be able to read and write basic scripts. This way, when a client or your boss comes to you with some shopping cart script that he wants you to install … you wont be freaking out because you don’t understand a thing.

So in keeping with my goal of training you guys and girls up, I just wanted to announce my latest video tutorial; a course on Javascript: Beginners Javascript.

… OK, not the most exciting title, but the video tutorials are perfect for people new to programming. Some details:

Beginners Javascript is designed to teach total beginners Javascript programming. By the end of the 5 hrs of video training (over 39 individual videos) you will feel comfortable reading and writing usable Javascript code for everyday web tasks like spawning windows, validating forms and creating simple page effects.

The table of contents:

Introduction (10:09)
First Javascript (10:21)
What is a programming language (6:18)
Javascript event handlers part 1 (8:58)
Javascript event handlers part 2 (6:40)
Javascript event handlers part 3 (4:50)
Javascript errors part 1 (6:39)
Javascript errors part 2 (4:39)
Javascript variables part 1 (10:53)
Javascript variables part 2 (10:01)
Javascript execution (4:21)
Javascript functions part 1 (8:46)
Javascript functions part 2 (6:22)
Javascript functions part 3 (6:32)
Javascript functions part 4 (9:27)
if statements part 1 (7:33)
if statements part 2 (6:52)
if statements part 3 (8:55)
Javascript loops part 1 (8:25)
Javascript loops part 2 (5:58)
Javascript object; a birds eye view (8:31)
Javascript arrays part 1 (3:36)
Javascript arrays part 2 (7:44)
Javascript arrays part 3 (5:28)
Javascript functions cont. part 3 (8:13)
Javascript functions cont. part 4 (10:16)
Javascript functions cont. part 4-b (9:57)
Javascript functions cont. part 5 (9:18)
Introduction to the DOM part 1 (8:31)
Introduction to the DOM part 2 (3:37)
Javascript forms part 1 (14:50)
Javascript forms part 2 (15:10)
Javascript forms part 3 (6:58)
Javascript forms part 4 (8:51)
Creating a toggle menu part 1 (6:59)
Creating a toggle menu part 2 (10:39)
Linking to external Javascript files (5:46)
Spawning windows with Javascript (9:24)
Javascript frameworks, conclusion to course (4:24)

That’s it for now.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

In this video I introduce you to two things:

1. Basic object oriented concepts.
2. The Javascript object hierarchy.

The goal of this video is to give you a birds eye view of Javascript, to hopefully make it easier to understand how to use this language in later videos.

This video is from my very soon to be released Javascript basics video tutorial course.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

Hi,

I just released and brand new course on the Javascript framework called jQuery. JQuery is a very popular Javascript library that many web designers will find themselves working with.

You can find about 40 minutes of free videos from the course here:

www.killerjavascript.com/beginners-jquery/

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

As you may know, I am a big Wordpress fan and I use it on a few of my ‘killer’ sites. Anyway, I just discovered that the Wordpress nerds have used the Google Gears project to speed up the Wordpress admin user interface.

What is Gears?

Gears is basically a browser add-on that allows Javascript code to run much faster. To use Gears, you as a programmer, has to build it into your Javascript code (as the Wordpress people did ..) and for people to benefit from Gears, it has to be installed into their browsers.

.. You can learn more about this in this video I just created:

You can install Gears (into your web browser) here:

http://tools.google.com/gears/

Please note that Gears works with Firefox and Explorer only.

I hope you guys find this useful.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

… I thought I posted this before, but non of my site searches came up with anything. Here is a common question:

Enjoyed the first video about building web sites. Very clear and to the point. I just have a difficulty since I’m using Mac 10.5.7 and I tried the Text Edit application but didn’t get the same results. I managed to save it to my Desktop as an html file and it did open in the browser but the code just appeared exactly as the code appeared in Text Edit rather than in bold with different font sizes (h6 or h4) or paragraphs and so forth. What am I getting wrong? Am I using the wrong application (SimpleText is an older Mac app).

If you are trying to create an HTML document using a Mac text editor (like Text Edit) and all you are getting is the code being displayed rather than a web page, watch this video on creating an html document with a Mac.

Hope that helps,

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

This is part 2 of my video tutorial on how to use Youtube to deploy videos in web pages. You can may want to also watch part 1 of my Youtube video embed tutorial.

Some final notes:

Video Processing Notes:

Dimensions: 1280 x 720
h.264 (MP4)
5000 kbits/sec

Dimensions: 640 x 480 / 640 x 360
h.264 (MP4)
3000 kbits/sec

Nerd’s Choice: I find 640 x 360 works well for live action videos.

As always, thanks for dropping by.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

1. Using a site like Youtube.
2. Embedding the videos directly using a Flash video player.

I also get into the video formats you can use to embed video in a website:

1. Flash FLV
2. H.264
3. Quicktime video
4. Windows WMV

For details and pro’s and con’s, watch the video:

As you probably noticed, I am using Youtube to deliver this video as part of an ongoing experiment. If you can’t see the video, it is probably because your work place is blocking Youtube. Let me know and I will release another copy of the video on the killersites.com servers.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

This is just a quick warning that the trial download of Premiere CS4 is buggy .. at best.

Install Process Craps Out

I tried to install it on my Mac several times and I kept getting an error message that did not help. In the end, after rebooting several times and following all trouble shooting instructions that Adobe provides .. it would not install.

… Talk about lousy software!

Seriously, when a company can’t even make their install process work … you have to wonder! I should also point out that (after some digging with Google) that I am not the only one who has had this problem. That said, the trial worked fine on Windows XP.

Premiere’s Trial Version is Crippled!

The not so nice thing (due to licensing issues,) is that the trial version cannot work with several common video file types like h.264! That meant that I could not test how well Premiere would handle editing the file types I deal with daily. Sucks.

Oh well, I guess I will have to take a look at Final Cut.

Stefan Mischook

I recently put out a few new videos on Javascript event handlers:

Javascript Event Handlers Part 1

Javascript Event Handlers Part 2

Javascript Event Handlers Part 3

These are part of my new growing collection of Javascript video tutorials that aim to teach total beginners how to read and write practical Javascript.

I would like to point out that I’ve invested in making the sound for these videos as clear as possible … so let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com