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If you're using Safari (which I am -- I just can't stand that Firefox widgets look like they live in Windows 95 land), you have to get Safari Adblock. Ads suck. Don't put up with them. Sorry Windows users (aka "suckers"), this appears to be for OS X Safari only, right now.

I've been doing some work for Fourthdoor Creative and tonight I put together some slideshows for a website using SlideshowPro and some nifty php/htaccess coding. The project called for 23 slideshows, each consisting of three to ten pictures. So, since I'm lazy and didn't feel like writing 23 xml files for SSP, I wrote a little php script to parse through the directories and hand out xml files on the fly. Thru htaccess/mod_rewrite "RewriteRules", I redirect requests for the xml files to a script which returns xml for SSP and displays the slideshow. Additionally, I used the ExternalInterface in Flash to dynamically switch the xml file so I didn't have to create 23 separate pages for each slideshow. Adding a project slideshow now is a fairly trivial task that involves editing one html file, uploading it and the directory that contains the pictures of the project. So about 10 minutes as compared to the (estimated) 30-45 it would take to create a new page, drop in the slideshow component, create the xml file, add the new project to all existing pages, etc, etc...

Unfortunately, all these "cool" features lean heavily on javascript for the functionality. While I would have written it to work with javascript and without, I just didn't feel like putting the time and effort into it for this project. For larger projects that have more exposure, I would definitely want to make things as accessible as possible. It wouldn't have been terribly difficult in this case, I just don't see the need, and again, I do not want to spend the time on it. Not to mention that most of the quoted time is gone; spent resizing/cropping/tweaking 200-odd images for the slideshows :-)