Nice weather today. I am just testing the post-by-phone capability, so I snapped a pic with my cell phone and sent it to my blog. Looks like it worked, but I had to manually delete the signature that U.S. Cellular placed at the end of the message (which is not cool Joan!).

If you look closely you can see “The Bean”.

Since I spend a lot of time on the road, it seemed like a great idea
that WordPress allows posting to my blog via email. I can think of a
thousand cool uses for this, but mainly I just want to CC my blog
whenever I write a descriptive email. I find myself explaining and
discussing things more often by email than anything else. This is an
example of just such an email that I sent somebody, and just thought I
would copy my blog site while I was at it.

I have to admit that it is very convenient to assume that users will all get broadband eventually. And I, like many developers, fail to remember that we tend to have much faster connection speeds than many of our users. A common pitfall of Flash design is to allow a fast connection to lull you into a false sense of usability for your content. My office has a lightly loaded fibre optic connection which is virtually 10 times faster than even what DSL users are experiencing.

So what can be done to test Flash for 56k modem users when you enjoy such a high-speed connection? I started using a product called CCProxy about six months ago, and it has been not only useful, but free! The product is an Internet sharing proxy that is free for up to 3 users, which is 2 more than I need. Best of all, you can set the allowable bandwith. When I want to see what modem users will experience, I set the bandwith to 7,168 bytes/second. I also need to tell my browser to proxy through port 808. If I need to switch back to full speed, I just turn off the browser’s proxy option.

My only complaint, and it is a minor one, is that you must calculate the bytes/second in order to get the bandwith setting you need. I have a cheat sheet that I keep handy just for this purpose however. If my calculations are correct, here are some common connection speeds, and the appropriate bandwidth setting:

• 56k modem = 7,168 bytes/sec
• 128k DSL = 16,384 bytes/sec
• 256k DSL = 32,768 bytes/sec
• 512k DSL = 65,536 bytes/sec
• 1m Cable = 131,072 bytes/sec

CCProxy - Easy-to-use Proxy Software for Windows 2000/98/XP/NT

Since I recently became a huge fan of Wordpress, I have turned two sites into full featured weblogs. My enthusiasm for blogging is almost as strong as my interest in Flash development, so naturally I am trying to use both of these together.

As Microsoft gradually and quietly rolls-out the “Eolas” update, Flash developers are finding that users will be required to click on the SWF once to activate it, before they can interact with the content. This seems insane, but stems from a recent lawsuit between Eolas and Microsoft, hence it is commonly referred to as the Eolas udpate to IE.

So in addition to finding a way to easily add Flash content to Wordpress posts, I also want to use my favorite Eolas work-around, FlashObject. Having never authored my own WordPress plugin, I chose to hack my Wordpress install rather than produce a nice neat solution that could be easily distributed (sorry). But this post is intended to explain what I did, inspire others to clean it up, and hopefully result in a Wordpress plugin from somebody more qualified than me.
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