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.
I’ll put an assortment of forms here for you to use as inspiration. These will be more expensive than the little sidebar ones in the previous post. Feel free to play with them. Samples are not actually sending out email.
These email contact forms will fit nicely in the sidebar of a wordpress blog, like the slightly larger one I have in my sidebar over to the right.
Why have an email contact form? Anyone can mail you, but no one can see your email address. This includes spammers and bots. The fact that your form is in a flash object means that only humans can email you.
What do you get? If you have your own hosting, you get an html page that the form code is embedded in, a text file with the html code for the form ready to insert into your sidebar, the .swf file which is the flash form, and a .php file to manage the email. The .swf file comes with the location of your php file coded into it, the php file has your email address edited in, and the .html file has the location of your flash file edited in. So you can’t just buy and upload, I will have to edit it for you.
You get directions for inserting it into the sidebar of a Wordpress blog.
If you don’t have a blog whose sidebar you can edit, you may not be be able to install it there. It is still possible for you to put a form on a page in your blog. You can also link to an .html contact page. If you don’t have hosting, I can provide perpetual hosting for all files for a one-time fee.
These are a few samples of one possible style in a number of colors. They can be made in any color to coordinate with your blog theme. I’ll come up with a page of other styles soon. Email me if you are interested.
By the way, although these say, “Click to email me,” the email function on all the samples in this post is disabled. You can click and see what happens when you try to send an email without editing the name, address, or message. Click to clear the form and try to send again. Then fill in the form properly and see what happens. Besides not allowing you to send an unedited or blank mail, the php form does some checks to make sure the email address is really an address.
Click away!
The price is $15 ready to install or $20 installed.
Looking through my account, I found that the single most popular sale item was a color swatch set I made a while back. I’ve put together some color palettes. Each includes an image of each of the colors pictured in one of the vertical strips above and a larger swatch with all the hex codes labeled on it. It comes packed in a .zip file. Unpack and upload any images to your image host. Use the hex codes for text or table backgrounds or for working with images in an editor.
I’ve designed some templates based on an azalea photo I really liked. I made the background of the image in five different colors, so there’s a slight difference in the templates.
The listing template comes with a complete set of buttons, including eight tribute buttons, wishlist, blog, website, buy now, video, photos, recording, and call buttons. The email template comes with a buy now button.
Important! These are templates, not custom listings. If you want me to code up the listings with your text, links, and photos, that will be extra. If your photos need editing, that will be extra. I can help you learn to use an email template in a quick email exchange, but I can’t teach you the html you need to put a listing template together easily if you’re not comfortable with it already. Don’t buy a template if you can’t edit text and tags in html by hand, without an html editor.
I made up some more subtle variations, but they’re hard to see in the thumbnails. Here are some background samples so you can see what the flower backgrounds look like.
Want to spiff up your listing but aren’t ready to take the plunge? You can just get a pretty text effect for $5. It includes a solid background to match your page, and a fine border if you have a pattern background.
You can’t use a background color name for your Niteflirt pages, although you can anywhere else on the web.
To put a page background on a Niteflirt listing or homepage, use the following code:
There’s a tutorial on putting colored backgrounds on Niteflirt listings by making color images in Paintshop Pro. Everybody doesn’t have Paintshop Pro, so I thought I’d make up a little pack of color swatches, images that you can use to put color in the background of your listings.
I now have available a callbutton script modified to work on Godaddy hosting. I’ll send it to you for free when you buy a set of callbuttons, stock or custom. Just email me if you buy a set and I’ll send it to you.
