When I initially started this blog, I used the simple Blogspot application that Google provides, whilst this was fairly easy to use I didn’t like using a sub-domain of Blogspot itself, so opted to purchase my own domain.

I purchased the domain through Google (which acts as an agent for GoDaddy) but was restricted by the lack of webmaster options available. When using Google Apps, you have to follow Google’s rules which are heavily sandboxed, you can’t really do much as a web master.

Upon deciding that Google was to restrictive I opted to move to WordPress. This post will not explain how to make the move to WordPress, but more generically how to host your Google Apps domain on a different server, whilst keeping your Google Apps functionality intact.

So, here we go:

1. Go to:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/your_domain.com/DomainSettingsAdvancedDns

Insert your domain name into the above URL. This should prompt you to login to the admin section of your Google Apps site.

2. Once logged in the page will display a set of login details. Click “Sign in to DNS console“. This should open a new window and prompt you for the login details displayed on the previous page. Type in the details and click login.

3. Once you’re in your domains advanced DNS console click “DNS Manager“. This should open a table of addresses.

4. Now you need to modify your records. First of all delete the CNAME (Alias) record which  has “WWW” as the host name.

5. Delete all A (Host) records.

6. Once all of the necessary records have been deleted login to your new hosting company’s control panel (e.g. where you plan to link your domain to) and find out what your hosting server IP address is. Once you have this address create two A (Host) records. The first record’s host should be set to “@” and the other to “WWW“. Both must then point to the IP address that you just got.

7. Wait one hour for the information to update, and all should be completed!

As I know that many people are struggling with Codecademy Lesson 6, Javascript Quickstart Guide: indexOf strings, I’ve decided to post the answer’s code here.

function contains(str, substr) {
  if (str.indexOf(substr) != -1) {
    return true;
  } else {
    return false;
  }
}

As part of a project at work, I’ve been trying to export from Adobe Flash CS5.1 to Quicktime Movie (.mov) output. Instead of exporting at the same quality that was displayed in Flash itself, the file exported with hideous artifacts that rendered it useless.

This is an example of the artifacts in a .mov export:

I had to get this document exported, and found a workaround – be it clunky.

Modify your Flash

It was evident that the text was causing most of the problems, and therefore I converted all text from Adobe’s new TLF format, to Classic Text. This got rid of the problems of artifacting text tweens. For any graphics that you have, ensure they are converted to the correct type of symbol – graphic, movie or button.

Use a different export method


Instead of exporting directly to Quicktime .mov, I used export to JPEG image sequence. Exporting to an image sequence means that flash will create a JPEG image for every frame in your flash document – yes file sizes can be large. I used a 90% quality setting – this saved a lot of space and didn’t noticably affect output quality.

I then opened the image sequence using Quicktime 7 pro. This application isn’t pre-bundled with Macs running Lion, so you will have to download it from here. Once Quicktime is open, click File> Open Image Sequence and select the first image that flash generated. Once Quicktime opens the image sequence you can save the file in any format that you like. I would recommend using an Mpeg compression to maximise cross-platform compatibility.

Key points

• Avoid TLF text – using classic text for text tweens.
• Ensure that all media is converted to it’s appropriate format in Flash – button, movie, or graphic.
• Play around with export methods and consider using an image sequence export.