Mele Kelikimaka!

December 24, 2003 | 4 Comments

It’s Christmas Eve and I wanted to wish everyone a happy and safe (and hopefully long) holiday weekend.

To celebrate the holidays I’ve whipped up a Flash slideshow presentation with lots of photos from my trip to Hawaii. This is something I sent out to all my friends and family and since I consider all my readers friends, even though I’ve not met most of you in person I wanted to let you in on the fun as well.

I’m an amateur photographer but I think I’ve got some decent shots in there. It’s amazing what a digital camera can do.

Please, take a look and Mele Kelikimaka to you and yours!

As a special treat for all the geeks out there, here is a bit more info about the slideshow.

The photos were taken with my brand new Nikon Coolpix 4300 and a few disposable underwater camera. The photos were not edited in anyway except for cropping. Most of the shots are typical tourist fare, but I hope to get a bit more creative as I get better.

I’d be interested in hearing which you like best.

The slideshow was made with a heavily modified version of the Easy Slideshow Component found here. It’s great to use as a base for something like this, but required some pretty in-depth custom ActionScripting and skinning to get it to what I wanted.

It runs off an XML file and loads each image individually as it needs them. This makes updating very easy as you just need to drop a new image in and update the xml file with the image title and location.

The slideshow page validates XHTML 1.0 Strict. This is only proof that coding with XHTML and CSS has become second nature to me. I didn’t set out with that in mind — I just wanted to get it done quickly.

The slideshow itself is about 4 Megs in size, mainly due to the music. I decided not to stream it because it seemed to interfere with the performance of the images loading. The songs you hear are “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow” by Leon Redbone and “Mele Kelikimaka” by the immortal Bing Crosby.

I’ve provided an HTML version for those with slow connections and problems with the Flash player. I used iPhoto to export that.

The design was almost an afterthought and I really wanted to do more but I started to run out of time. I think it looks alright, but my main focus was on getting the images selected and sized to fit the slideshow.

I gave almost no thought into accessibility or usability (other than making an HTML version which should take care of any problems) as I just wanted to have some fun with it. I hope most folks can take advantage of the Flash version but if not…oh well.

That’s about it. Happy Holidays everyone.

Filed under: Life and Such