Proflirts site down - callbutton script

The original open source callbutton script was written by Mistress V and graciously provided free of charge on her Proflirts website. Since then it has been modified by Hypnotic Guy into a thing of remarkable versatility. However, the original is simpler and may meet the needs of most flirts.

I had heard rumors that there were some changes going on, so I saved the script package for download. I was disappointed to hear this week that the Proflirts site was down. But since I have the script, I can supply it here. I even added a little text file on how to make your button script, which used to be on the Proflirts blog.

Keep in mind that this is not a beginner project. You will need a website of your own, and you will need to be comfortable following instructions to edit files in Notepad, even though you may not understand exactly what it is that you are doing.

Right-click, save, and unzip.

Making a tiled background in Paintshop Pro

I have wanted to do a lot of tutorials in Paintshop Pro, but I’m often stopped by the fact that a simple tutorial intended to help a newbie master a single technique often produces something that is less than a work of art, while techniques can get lost in tutorials that produce complex works of art.

Of course, my other beef with a lot of tutorials is that the newbie will have to download a lot of “materials”, including tubes, brushes, filters, and sometimes even buy them. In the end, if the newbie ends up following directions correctly and finishing whatever it is, she can’t really use it (the copyright still belongs to the designer) and the individual techniques have gotten lost in the details.

I’m sure you’ve seen lots of background images on myspace and other member sites where the images just repeats. It doesn’t match at all. There are just ugly seams.

I’m going to show you how to tile a background using Paintshop Pro. It’s a pretty simple way to do it. There are lots of other ways to do it, too, but let’s not get into that right now. If you’re interested in doing some research, there’s a link at the bottom of this tutorial where you can find out ways some artists do it.

Here is my baby Maude, hiding in plain sight on a rug.

Here she is tiled into a background.

Here we are in Paintshop Pro with the image open. Although impressive images can be made from big photos, they can take a very long time to load. So it’s better to plan on having a smaller image repeat. I reduced Maude’s photo greatly to make it this convenient size.

Select Effects=>Image Effects=>Seamless Tiling

This window pops up.

There are a lot of settings you can adjust in this window. I find that the “corner” and “bidirectional” tend to give less vertical and horizontal effect. You can zoom your view. You can also click the die on the far right to get random settings. If you lose yourself in random settings and want to get back, go up to the top and dropdown the preset menu. Choose “factory default”. You should play with the settings sometime to get a feel for what they can do.

I’m going to tick the “Show tiling preview” box, which will bring up a preview window.

This looks okay. You can adjust the magnification to see it better if you like.

Close it and hit the ‘OK’ button. Maude is now tiled.

The page

For lots more info on tiling backgrounds and even some freebies, Visit this blog, where you’ll find a collection of tutorial links halfway down the page. I’ve looked at a few of them. You can do some amazing things, but have your patience ready!

Richard Kern’s Guide to Erotica

This is an online article that everyone who has ever thought of taking sexy photos of themselves or anyone else should read. It has all kinds of helpful tips on the mechanics of sexy photography, as well as a cool slideshow of his work, which unfortunately did not permit itself to be embedded here.

He’s made a lot of photography books, but I couldn’t find one that the article seemed to be about. Just bookmark it. It may come in very handy for you very soon or at a later date.

Story

Sparkly tiara-Paintshop and Swish, sound and sparkles

What I’ve got here is a flash movie of a tiara that plays a soundtrack and sparkles when you mouse over it. The sparklies and sound stop when you mouse out.

If you want to buy this, it will cost $10, $12 by payment mail. For this price I can make it with the background color or image of your choice (you supply). It can play the sound or soundtrack of your choice, which can loop multiple times or play once - like perhaps your voice. The entire image can click through to the url of your choice (which can be a payment mail button url). You will get the .swf file to upload to your website and the embed code to place on your pages or in your blog.

There was somebody on a Swish forum asking about sound. I started to make a Swishmax 2 sound tutorial, but before I got done I had given the tiara sparklies. It got a little complicated, since I ended up using both Paintshop Pro and Swishmax. I’ll give you some basic instructions, and if you know what you’re doing in Paintshop Pro or some other graphics software you’ll be able to make the images. You then need some basic skills in Swishmax 2 to put it together. I’ll talk you through it, but I don’t have the time or space to do an entire tutorial on something that takes a while to make (Jing is good for 5 minutes).

First, pick out a photo. I took a photo of a tiara I have. I painstakingly removed the background, cleaning it up pixel by pixel. This happened last year, so the fact that I was really sick of it by the time I was done with it meant it was ready and waiting for me today. You can use any photo you want if you don’t care about the background.

Make 4 new raster layers, select the brush tool, a sparkle-shaped brush, and the color white. In sizes 30, 40, and 60 and 3 different sparkle angles drop sparkles on each layer. Save the layers and the image itself (mine has no background so I can switch that) as .png files. You should now have 4 sparkle images and 1 photo image.

Open Swish and create a new movie. Select a background color (Modify => movie properties => background color).

Import all 5 images into the movie (Insert => Import image…), with the photo as the bottom layer in the outline panel (drag it to the bottom if it is not). If the sparkle layers are not aligned over the photo (this can happen when importing transparent images), hide them in the outline panel, select and make them visible one at a time, and then align them to it with the select tool.

Group the 4 sparkles layers as a movie clip (Modify => Grouping => Group as Movie Clip). Name the movie clip ‘Sparkles’.

Select the movie clip in the outline panel. Its timeline will open at the top of the screen. Give the first sparkle image a “fade in” effect (Add effect => Fade => Fade in) on frame 2 and a “fade out” effect (Add effect => Fade => Fade out) on the next frame after the effect. Click the “fade in” effect on the timeline to highlight it, hold down the Shift key, and click the “fade out” effect. Right click the effect, and choose “copy effect” from the dropdown menu. Click frame 6 of the next sparkle image on the timeline, then right click and “paste effect”. Paste the effect on frame 11 of the 3rd image and 16 of the 4th.

Now, let’s select the photo in the outline panel. In the script panel, select Add Script => Self => onSelfEvent(rollOver). Select Add Script => Movie control => Play(). In the ‘target’ dropdown select the movieclip you named ‘Sparkles’.

Go to the Layout view and preview your movie. The sparkles start right away. We need to stop that by making the movieclip stop on frame 1.

So select the Script tab. Select the movie clip again in the outline panel. Click frame 1 in the timeline of the movieclip object. Down in the script panel, choose Add Script => Movie control => Stop.

Now preview the movie again.

We want the movie clip to play smoothly and continuously while the cursor is over the image. To make it repeat smoothly, select frame 31 in the movie clip timeline. Select Add script => Movie control => Go to and play => gotoAndPlay(FRAME). Choose ‘this’ from the target dropdown and change the number in the ‘Goto frame’ field to ‘6′.

Now preview the movie again.

Now we need to make the movie clip go away after the mouse goes off it.

On the next frame on the timeline of the movieclip after the last frame, add a ‘remove’ effect to all the sparkle images. Select the photo in the Outline panel. In the script view, Add Script => Event => Self => onSelfEven(rollOut). Add Script => Movie control => Go to and play => gotoAndPlay(FRAME), select the movieclip, which will appear as _parent.Sparkles in the target dropdown. Change the frame to ‘32′.

Preview that again.

Okay, let’s add sound. Click in the rollOver effect in the script panel. That’s where you need to add the effect. Add Script => Sound => playSound(…) => Import. Now select your sound. If you want it to loop, press the Sound Effects button, and add a number of repeats.

Click in the rollOut effect. Add Script => Sound => stopSound(…), select your sound.

Now preview again.

Let me know if there’s a problem with this tutorial. My contact form is in the sidebar.

Putting Flash into Wordpress

First of all, Wordpress will not recognize a local file. So you will have to edit the html embed code to put the absolute path to your .swf file, wherever you have put it on your site (or elsewhere). Two different places in the code you will see a reference to “myfilename.swf”. You will have to edit it to make the full url, such as “http://mywebhost.com/swfs/myfilename.swf”.

Wordpress has a sucky visual editor. They were supposed to fix it in the 2.5 release, but it’s even worse now than ever. It used to be I could just disable the visual editor, but now it mangles code in the disabled mode, too. And one of the things it totally mangles is the html code you use to embed your flash.

So first, you need to disable the editor. Go to users and select your profile. The top option on the page is the “Visual Editor/Use the visual editor when writing” checkbox. Uncheck it.

Now Wordpress is still going to mangle our code, because unlike in regular html, Wordpress thinks that line breaks and spaces mean something important. And it thinks they mean something different each time it sees them. If your embed code is full of line breaks and spaces, as SWISHmax 2-exported code is, Wordpress is going to look at each line, decide what it really wants to turn it into, and then go ahead and do it. By the time it gets done you will just have some gibberish on the page that doesn’t resemble your embed code.

So what can you do? Open up Notepad. Make sure that Word Wrap is turned off (Format => Word Wrap). Open your html file that SWISHmax 2 put the embed code in. The part you need starts with <object> and ends with </object>. Start with that first <object> tag, hit the “End” key on your keyboard, then press the delete key until you have deleted all the spaces between that and the next. Leave a space between words and phrases within a bracket; leave no spaces between one tag and the next. What you should end up with is your entire embed code on one line. Now just copy and paste it into your blog.

Font colors

Changing font colors

Here’s a big chart of color names. There’s no guarantee that they will work on Niteflirt, but if you like one that doesn’t, just copy the hex code, hashmark and all, and put it instead of the color name.
Color reference

More about fonts

Web-safe fonts your visitor should have on his computer.

Putting a YouTube video into SwishMax 2

You can. What you need is the url, then you can import it into your movie.

This is the url of the rabbit video we’re going to embed.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bZBHZT3a-FA

But that’s not enough information. It doesn’t have the whole filename, and it has that “watch” thing in it. The entire url you need is found in the embed code. I have made it bold for you.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/bZBHZT3a-FA&hl=en&fs=1“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”<</param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/bZBHZT3a-FA&hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Let’s compare them again and see the difference and similarities.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=bZBHZT3a-FA
http://www.youtube.com/v/bZBHZT3a-FA&hl=en&fs=1

Basically, what you have to do is find the ‘http://youtube.com/…’ part of the embed code and copy everything between the double quotes enclosing it.

Now let’s make a movie. Open SWISHmax 2. Select “create a new movie” from the splash screen.

I’m going to set the width at “475″ and the height at “380″. (Modify => Movie properties)

Select the rectangle tool and draw a rectangle toward the top of the screen. In the reshape panel, set the width to “475″ and the height to “380″—the size of the video. Set the background fill to “none”, the line color to “black”, and the line width to “0″. Set the reference point to upper-left and click the “x=0″ button in the transform panel. Set “x” and “y” both to “0″. The rectangle should be the same size and location on your screen as the movie.

With the rectangle selected, choose Modify => Grouping => Group as Movie clip. With the movie clip selected, switch to the script panel. Select Add Script => Events => Frame => onSelfEvent(load). Now select Add Script => External files and data =>Load/unload Movie Clip => loadMovie(…). Type or copy the filename into the “URL” field at the top, then type ‘this’ (no quotes) into the “Movie Clip” field.

Okay, let’s look. Switch back to layout view and click the “preview” arrow at the top of the screen.

There it is. Isn’t that rabbit cute?

Screencast tutorials: Changing font part 1

Changing Fonts

New Swishmax 2 effects chart

This post is not for my regular readers, who I fully expect do not have Swishmax 2. This is for those of you out there who have Swishmax 2 (and Swishmax, too) and would like to use their preprogrammed text effects more, but can’t tell by looking at the lists what does what and which is which.

I made a flash movie which is a series of interactive charts based on screenshots of the dropdown menus. I just added a whole lot of little buttons to it which you can mouseover to watch the text effects beneath. It was tedious to do, but now I have the reference, and so do you. Enjoy!

The chart