Oscar Trelles

From their homepage: The Macromedia Flash Advertising Alliance is pleased to launch a new web site dedicated to the online advertising community. Discuss what’s happening in the online advertising world with peers from the agency, technology and publishing communities.
It seems like the cries for better uses of Flash in the Advertising industry are making its way to higher levels. I have never seen a previous version of the MFAA web site, so I can’t make any comparisons; however, the current site promises to become a valuable resource for all of us, directly or indirectly involved in the development of rich media advertising using Flash, though some of their case studies reinforce ‘bad’ practices…
Hopefully they will hear us more closelly in the future, and start promoting better, less intrusive approaches to online marketing. Here is where to start: MFFA Forum.

Have you ever seen it?? If not, check it out here. This is one of the most interesting Google-based applications I have ever found in the net. It’ based in Java and shows the connections between a given site and the sites it is connected with, either by linking to or being linked from them. The important limitation is that all the sites must be Google-related, meaning they have to be listed under the same category at the DMOZ open directory. To be honest, I’m not sure about this last statement, if anybody knows what ‘related:’ does to a search for a domain name in Google, please let me know, since I haven’t found an answer yet.
When I first found this tool, I couldn’t experiment with my site because it wasn’t listed in the DMOZ, so I sent my application and then… forgot about it. Today I was reviewing some text files containing urls that for reason are not included in my Bookmarks, and I found the URL for the TG Google Browser. Now I tried putting my site, and it worked! That’s why I assumed that my site needed to be in the DMOZ… but I noticed some of it’s ‘related’ or neighbor sites are not.

I’m very sorry for the lack of updates on this site lately, but I’m just recovering from a very very bad cold that kept me in bed for the last four days… now I’m behind schedule on pretty much everything, and starting tomorrow I will have to double the shift to keep the job
Hope you are starting your week with good health.

It seems like Macromedians are interested in improving the experience of people running blogs. Here, you can read what Kevin Lynch and others have to say about the current platforms of choice for most bloggers, and ideas to make designing and maintaining blogs a smoother task. What follows is the comment I just posted there:
I don’t know how many people run their own blogging systems. I’m working on my own, after experimenting with Blogger for about 4 months, finding so many limitations and trying to solve some of them with my bare hands
I’m sure users of other platforms got their own issues, but they are more or less the same thing: incompatibility with existing technologies and lack of ‘advanced’ features. For instance, to know if somebody posts a comment here after mine, I will have to come back and see. I don’t have anything about coming back to Kevin’s page, but wouldn’t it be nice if I could subscribe to the thread and be notified by email when new comments are posted?
Although features like that are fairly easy to implement, from my point of view, the most important concern to address is the necessity of a ‘perfect’ separation between functionality, data and design. If components and templates can do the trick, they will be more than welcome. Macromedia has the means to provide their users with these commodities, although I’m sure I will be using them after tasting the power of a custom-made system.

It was a little tough to get to the office today, too much snow in Manhattan’s sidewalks… that made me remember this little snow example I worked on before last Christmas. It is more about the snow crystals design, since I followed a tutorial at kirupa.com to make the flakes float. If you didn’t see it before, I hope you enjoy it.

The list of finalists for this year’s version of the Film Festival has been posted online for a couple of days now. Although there are too many, and the list is a little hard to read given to the color schema chosen for the page, try to review all of them and cast your votes. There are so many interesting projects among the candidates, I’m sure you will have a tough time selecting your favorites, as I haven’t yet. Well, we have until March 14th to make a decision and participate in the election.
Good luck to all participants!

The Logo Competition over at What Is Flash (WIF) is over, and the most voted entry belongs to Christopher Wigginton, known as ‘bembino’ in the forums and the WIF community. Congratulations to him. You can check the winner logo here, although it is already being displayed at the home page.

Every month, from all the publications I receive regularly, the one for which I waited the most was New Architect. Sadly, the issue I have in my hands right now is being announced as the last one for the magazine. Writes Christopher Null, editor in chief: “Over the last few days, New Architect has found itself inexplicably overwhelmed by fan mail. But as any editor will tell you, whenever something good like this happens, it’s a sure sign of trouble. True to that theory, I have some bad news: The issue you are holding will be our last installment”.
About a year ago, WebTechniques changed its name to New Architect, after several years of focusing in web related technologies and tools. But the change wasn’t only about the name, the publication was trying to go one level up and reach new audiences among Technology managers, providing coverage of enterprise-level technologies. Reactions were very mixed at the moment. Apparently, the change didn’t help too much, as the advertising market kept on shrinking, along with the budget of targeted-audience publications. Now it’s over, New Architect is gone for good, and who knows who’s turn it will be tomorrow.
The fact is that I will miss New Architect, and I can’t find a new favorite yet…

Well, I let it die. When I first launched this part of my site, I had the time to make two versions (english/spanish) for almost every posting; but then, things at work got too busy and I just stopped posting in Spanish.
Right now I am working on my own ‘blogging’ system, and as soon as I’m done with it I’ll start blogging in Spanish again!

About a week ago I added NoMaster to my column on the left, and although I didn’t blog about that when doing it, I would like to acknowledge the great work over at that site: lots of short news everyday, for Spanish-speaking people. It is maintained by Ricardo Salazar (I don’t know the names of other collaborators), a peruvian living and working in Spain.
And today, over at onRelease, I found out about another blog in Spanish named Funciton, available also in English and maintained by Fernando Florez. Congratulations to him, and welcome to the blogging world!