Cat Burton

Yesterday, Grant Skinner (creator of the awesome GTween library) came up with a competition for all those AS3 developers out there. The aim? Make something funky in 140 characters or less using the “gimme” code provided on: http://gskinner.com/playpen/tweetcoding.html

Within a few hours, there were some amazing tweets submitted, some of which just blow my mind. All submissions can be found here. One of my current favourites is this one of a tree, which is just brilliant!

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist the challenge, so have created Painted Rain, which is _supposed_ to look like drops of paint falling into water and blending together. Was really tough to do in 140 characters! Here’s the link to the swf, and the code:

h=r();l=600;o[i++]={a:h*l,b:r()*l,c:h*30,d:h*1e7};g.clear();for each(e in o){g.beginFill(e.d,20/e.c);g.drawCircle(e.a,e.b,e.c++)}i>150?i=0:i

You can keep up to date on the contest by searching for #tweetcoding on Twitter!

I’ve been suffering from a ridiculous amount of spam comments recently, and so have started using the Akismet spam checker. Already, I am noticing a massive improvement!

Akismet has correctly marked as spam many messages and has successfully ignored those comments which are in fact valid. When comments are marked as spam, you are able to view these and either delete them, or reinstate the comment (at which point, Akismet learns from its mistakes, thus improving the accuracy over time).

I would thoroughly recommend that anyone experiencing spam issues in their Wordpress site should check that the Akismet plugin is installed and enable it immediately!