The Grax Domain - Updates

Tester video entry

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 15:40:00 +0100

If you can't watch the video above, you can read what I said in the video below:

Hi this is Grax and I'm doing a little tester video entry.

Now I wanted to do something a bit more than just 'record myself on a digital camera and then upload it onto the Internet'. But the only video editing software that I do have is the Movie Maker thing you get with Windows XP. However I do have Adobe Flash. And I know how to use Adobe Flash.

So I thought I'd mess around with it and see what I can do.

I can import for video into it, edit it and export it out as a flv, which gets accepted by YouTube, Facebook and other bits and places like that. So that means I can create... potentially create all sorts of effects like drawing things on the screen, putting text to the screen, and of course... I can add music.

Now there's two main reasons why I wanted to do this. The first reason is I was doing a search on my video entries on Google and I did "advance", "hair", "studio" and "grax". And lo and behold my YouTube entry got turned up on some other random site. I dunno what it was. I'm guessing it was some collaboration site. The trouble was there was no immediate way upon it to see who I was or how to get to my website. So from now for all new video entries I'm going to be adding a kind of watermark so you can link to my address.

The second reason is regarding my new years resolution I made at the start. Now I said I wanted to play around a bit more with Flash and one of the ideas I had was to create Flash blog entries (or Flogs as I named them). Now the trouble was I kinda quickly realised that this would require a lot of time and effort and I had neither of those (certainly in the case of motivation). However I can do video entries and such. Now I can do that I can essentially churn them out. It's quick, it's simple to do and I can do all sorts of Flash effect on them (if this works). So I'm killing two birds with one stone as it were. I'm keeping up my side of the bargain and I trying to keep it a bit more entertaining.

So this is my tester entry in the world of video blogs. And I think it turned out OK.

Edit: Oooh, turns out you can export things in Flash as an avi file anyways. No flv malarkey for me. Awesome.

RSS feeds are now fixed

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:30:00 +0100

Oh dear. Looks like little Grax was a bit silly...

It would appear that people we unable to leave any comments on my site if they were to click through to a page via an RSS feed, with claims of odd 404 error pages. It happened a few times before in the past and I kinda ignored it, but it wasn't until Vixx came along and told me exactly when it was breaking (thanks again poppet) that I actually investigated some more. Why did it break? Well I'd rather not say... *grumble grumble pointing to the wrong URL grumble*

But good news! It was a simple fix to fix and I fixed it. So now it's safe to leave comments if you enter via an RSS feed. It's all going to be alright. Come on now, don't be shy.

So to celebrate, and because Elyse tag me and everyone else to do so, I'm gonna do one of those Meme thingys.

Here�s how you play: Once you�ve been tagged you have to write a blog with 10 weird, random facts, habits, or goals about yourself� at the end choose 5 people to be tagged. Don�t forget to leave them a comment saying (You�re It!) and to go read your blog. You cannot tag the person that tagged you. Yes I copied and pasted this paragraph from Elyse's page.

I'm very much a listener rather than a talker. I love listening to other people talking about their life.
I'm a shy guy that hides it through silly confidence and blunt honesty. Like everyone else I bet.
I believe that you can do anything (and I mean anything) you want in life, whether it be good or bad. You just have to be able to live with the consequences.
At my worse I used to weight 18 stone (252 lbs) and have a crappy beard to try and hide my fat neck. Now I'm a relatively healthy 13 stone (182 lbs) with optional clean shaven or manly stubble.
I feel that finding the right partner is more important (and much harder to do) than getting the right job.
I like to flirt badly with people, things like "That's a lovely dress, it would look good on my bedroom floor". I find it comical and easy to do, especially when you know that nothing will come of it. And really, people like to hear things like "You've got a really pretty face".
I've managed to get some people I know to call me Grax rather than my real name. I'm tempted to start introducing myself to new people as Grax and see how many people I can get to call me Grax.
I like to go out of my house to do stuff. For example I like to go to the office to do work, or I like to go to a gym to exercise. I don't like doing things like that at home because there's too many things at home to distract me, namely the Internet.
I find watching snooker or darts on the TV quite enjoyable and quite relaxing. Much better than any other sport on TV
After wearing temporary tattoos and colour contacts out in public I felt like I wanted people to come up to me and make comments about my appearance. Therefore a goal I could try is I'm going to try and approach more people that look plain different and compliment them.

As for passing this Meme on I think I'll pass it on to..... YOU!

Yes you!

Well go on then. I haven't got all day.

Grax all over your face.... book

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:40:00 +0000

Grax Domain been pimped out to the masses.

I just so happened to be browsing along Facebook and I noticed an interesting little app called Flog Blog. It's nothing more than a simple RSS feed reader with a Facebook skin on it, but I figured it would be a good way of getting more site exposure.

So now you can read my latest blog entries on my Facebook profile.

That is all.

Moving Servers: Complete

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:30:00 +0000

Bloody hell that was a feat an a half...

A few more kinks to iron out? A few kinks my arse!

Anyway the move to the new server is finished and everything should be back to normal for your reading pleasure. I'll be doing a big blog dump over the next few days to get this place up to speed.

On a side note I felt like adding two new categories to the site; Thought Of The Day and ~~Religion~~, although I'm not sure if the Religion category is 100% accurate seeing as it contain almost nothing else apart from the Alpha Course stuff that I've done (which I've completed now, no more sessions for me). I might change the Religion category to something like Alpha Course or something. I dunno.

Edit (16/12/2007) - Screw it I'm changing it from Religon to Alpha. It just makes more sense.

Moving Servers

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:45:00 +0000

The Grax Domain is gonna be in the process of moving servers. Hopefully it will be a painless process and everything will be completely sorted and out of the way by next week (I gotta find a decent place to have me stuff hosted first).

But if something fishy happens to the site then you'll know why.

I'll save any new entries until the move is complete.

Edit (8/12/2007) - Nearly there. Just a few more kinks to iron out...

Useful bits of code

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:50:00 +0100

I've been racking my brain over this ActionScript problem for days. Why is it that in ActionScript 3.0 you cannot easily set the alpha of a dynamic textfield? You can se the alpha of a movieclip or sprite, how bloody hard is it for a textfield?

Fortunately I found a link on the internet with a working solution (and no it is not "You have to embed the font, wah wah wah"), featuring filters. It's right here:

http://www.oddhammer.com/tutorials/alpha_dynamic_text/

Then it dawned on me. It took me a long while and rewording my google search to find this solution. And it was the only one. Surely there must be many people out there like me, looking for the solution but to no avail.

Plus it'll be a pain in the ass for me to find the link again.

Therefore I have a quest. No! A mini quest. I shall create a new category in the Links section called Useful bits of Code and inside it shall be an ever growing list of links that I find handy as a computer Internet programmer geek type person. Bits of code to aid me. Anyone who happens to read this is more than welcome to share my booty.

Oh, and I've added a couple more links namely in the Blog section.

New Skin: Pink Angel

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:49:00 +0000

Feeling inspired I have whipped up a new skin to go onto this site called Pink Angel. You can view it by clicking on the Pink Angel link underneath the navigation buttons to the side. Or to view the Pink Angel Skin click here.

It's pink and girly, but I like it too.

The Grax Domain v2.0

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:50:00 +0000

After several months (on-off) of hard work I can now reveal to the public Grax Domain version 2.0.

Doesn't look like it's changed much does it? Well... I like this layout. But there are changes. In fact there are the following changes:

First thing you'll notice is the navigation menu. There's bits popping out! That's the power of CSS! This way you'll be able to access the pages you want quicker
The archiving of past entries has been restructured and tidied up a bit
You can now search through past entries
You can change the layout of the site (as before) but look what happens when you mouse over the skin link. A thumbnail pops up! Wheee!
There's a couple of new layout available. Nothing graphically amazing, but mostly designed to make this site easier to read. Accessibilities the buzz-word (or something like that). Also the existing layouts Original and Hunk have been remade.
There's now a sitemap.
There;s now a proper emailing form that you can use to contact me. Handy if you don't have an email client like Outlook.
There's some new stuff that's been added and updated here and there.
The Magic 8 Ball's results page has been removed. It's been filling with spam far too often and I don't know if anyone actually reads the results. It just seems like too much hassle. Let me know if you think this is wrong. Besides the 8 Ball will get an update in the future.
I've removed the 'Image Security' thing for the comments pages and replaced it with a tick box. It seems to be working fine for The Art of Grax, so I don't see why it shouldn't work here. I'm going to trial it for a while and see what happens
I made a fav icon for the site. Aren't I special? =D

New Grax Domain: Beta

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:15:00 +0000

Over the past few months on and off (during my spare moments) I have been working on updating the whole website. Not just with updated content, but a restructure, adding of new features and making it more accessible for all. I have practically finished it all. But I want to run it as a 'test run' before I make it all official. Y'know, something like a couple of weeks or so to iron out all the kinks and stuff.

You can see the beta of the new Grax Domain at http://www.graxdomain.co.uk/beta/. That's not so hard to remember now is it?

I won't list out all the updates just yet, but keep an eye for 'Past Entries' and the site map at the bottom. As ever feel free to post comments, suggestions, spotted bugs, tips, and so on. Input is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

RSS feeds for The Grax Domain

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:48:00 +0100

You can now subscribe to the rambling and doodles of Grax. You can use the following feeds:

You can also subscribe to RSS feeds on The Art of Grax, so you'll never miss my latest and greatest creations.

After a while of studying how others do it I've created some home made php pages and a php class that generates RSS pages dynamically, which I'm quite pleased with. I intend to add some XSL styling to the RSS feed for extra goodness. This is the next step towards a better Grax Domain.