blog.vandervleuten.org

Bill Scott’s musings on rich web design and user interface engineering

In a nutshell
Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

The Web Robot Pages is an information resource dedicated to web robots. Initially hosted at WebCrawler in 1995, it moved to this dedicated site hosted by independent robotstxt.org in 2000. It underwent a modernisation in 2007.

It’s as certain as death and taxes: hackers will mercilessly attack your Web sites, applications, and services. If you’re vulnerable, you’d better discover these attacks yourself, before the black hats do.
Read more…

If you’ve been loading XML while working in the Flash IDE and then found it didn’t work anymore when you uploaded to your website, then you’ve probably come across the Flash cross-domain security.

Instead of trying to get the remote site to cooperate, you can just use a PHP script to retrieve the information for you. This PHP script must live on your webserver or you will have the same security problem. Otherwise, the script must live on a server that has a lenient crossdomain.xml setup.

Recently, there has been news regarding Flash authoring tools and XSS,
but the articles contained little technical information. Read more…

Warnings about the insecurity of online Flash multimedia created with all but the most recent authoring tools have largely fallen upon deaf ears, a security researcher told attendees here at the CanSecWest security conference.  Read more…

more…

Here’s a Flex component (with source) that does that sweet looking CoverFlow thing (you know, the iTunes/iPhone thing to show cover art). It’s a Flex component, so you can drop it into any Flex app.

You’re probably aware of those nice reflections appearing in some of the latest websites, online ads, and even software. It’s an effect common to “Web 2.0″ designs, in which something like an album cover or video player appears to reflect some sort of virtual floor beneath it. This tutorial steps you through the creation of the Reflect class, a custom ActionScript 3.0 class that you can apply to reflections on movie clips (and use to modify them) in your Flash CS3 Professional projects.