Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Learn Showit! Since we started a few months ago we’ve had almost 400 clients register with well over 700 downloads! Now that we have a solid idea of what you guys want to learn, we can develop a few special tutorial geared just for you. We have a lot of plans for Learn Showit next year, so you can expect to see more tutorials, more blog posts, and more Showit tips and tricks.
See you next year!
Check out http://www.learnshowit.com and click on the “tweet this site” link.
It will take you directly to Twitter.com and ask you to login. After logging in it will have a pre-formed tweet ready to go! ANYBODY can do this regardless of whether you are hosting with Showit or not, AND you can change what the actual tweet says! How cool is that!? There are only 2 things that you need; the official Twitter font and a bit of code (the only thing you REALLY need is the code). In fact, we’re going to make things easy for you and give you the already-converted-to-swf-ready-for-Showit font! True story! Download the font below.
http://www.learnshowit.com/twitter_font.zip
In the .zip folder are 3 files; twitter_font, twitter_font_2, and tweet_code. The code is below for reference on what to change, and is included in the .zip file. The Twitter font is two different colors, so instead of combining them into one we broke them apart for you so you can use both, or just the skinny font. If you do use both, play with the spacing of the skinnier font to get it to line up properly with the fat font. Go to Site—>Custom Fonts to import these two fonts into Showit.
Click on the text (or button) that you added, click the links tab, and choose the option for URL. Set it to open in a new window, and paste the code below. Overlay will not work for this. ONLY change what’s in bold.
http://twitter.com/home?status=Check out @learnshowit for Showit tutorials!
Happy designing!
Most of this killer feature has been available for some time now, however we’ve just recently had the time to really dig in and explore the benefits. With this latest update from Showit we’re now able to of course add ALT tags to images to aid in optimizing your site for search engines. We explored a little deeper and found that you can completely customize the HTML portion of your site, which is exactly what your mobile visitors see. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to get BIG photos on your site when visiting from an mobile phone, all while remaining invisible on the flash version of your site. We’ll also show you how to hack up your HTML pages to put photos on pages that don’t have photos.
*Edit* – This tutorial has been temporarily removed due to our concerns with Google’s stance on “hidden content.” While our intentions are well and good, we don’t want to get your site banned from Google. We will keep you updated on the status of this tutorial, when and if it becomes available.
We have a few tutorials that are going to be updated soon including the favicons tutorial. Until then here is a new way of adding animated favicons to your Showit site.
In this most recent update from Showit, we now have the capability to add HTML to the header before exporting the HTML pages instead of having to open up the page in an HTML editor such as Notepad++. One great example of the use of this new feature is the ability to easily add an animated favicon. Using this favicon generator you can easily generate a static favicon, an animated favicon, and a favicon for Apple iPod and iPod Touch. Just copy and paste the code provided below into the Custom Header HTML space provided. Please note, this area is NOT meant for anything other than meta tags and custom HTML and WILL break your site so experiment at your own risk.
Site——->Settings——>Advanced
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>
<link rel=”icon” type=”image/gif” href=”animated_favicon1.gif”>
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”apple-touch-icon.png”>
We can tell right off the bat that a lot of work went into this update for Showit. Not only was this an SEO update, it was also a bit of a UI update with subtle gradients added making the design experience more relaxing. The ability to view the back end HTML is a nice addition, however we’re a bit disappointed to still not have the ability to tweak the actual HTML of the page that’s exported. We hope that this was just in preparation for that feature being added at a later time. None the less the developers deserve a pat-on-the-back for again improving an already insanely awesome flash website builder. Here’s a screen cast outlining the basics of this much anticipated update that officially rolls out tomorrow.
*Edited to add*
When viewing the HTML, you an click the layers tab and easily choose what to included in your HTML. For example photographers would give ALT tags to all their images on their site, and click the “X” to change it to a check mark to include in your sites HTML.
