UPDATE: This site is now driven by Wordpress which is installed on this server. Even so the information below is still relevant. With the recent issues with pipes.yahoo.com and the critical bug that they had with their system I have decided to remove the two uncontrollable systems that my site is reliant on, blogger.com and yahoo.pipes. I have set up my own Wordpress blog on my server, this will allow me to manage and maintain issues myself. It also reduces the number of things that can go wrong – fingers crossed!

The content for this site use to resides on blogger.com and I am reading in the RSS feed as content and structure for this site. If you are viewing this from elliotrock.blogspot.com then leap to www.elliotrock.com.The process had to solve these issues:

- Flash cross domain security issues and not being able to load data from Blogger

- Stylesheet difference between AS3 StyleSheet class and the CSS at Blogger

Flash cross domain security issues and not being able to load data from Blogger

Blogger doesn’t provide an open cross-domain-policy file, so you cannot source their feeds directly. One of the issues with Flash expecting authorization to use data from external domains is that public systems like blogger don’t doffer as yet an open crossdomain.xml. This maybe due to the lack of people using Flash to view RSS feeds.

In order to solve or to use a better term to “work around” the Flash security and loading issues, I intially decided to use a RSS feed aggregate. It needed to provided an open cross domain policy in the format that was accept by Flash. An open policy basically gives all domains loading rights. The best service I found was yahoo.pipes. They run an amazing Javascript RIA application that allows you to not only redirect RSS feeds but filter, combine multiple feeds and more.

I set up a url feed reader that I could send from my Flash file, the blogger URL for the RSS feed. Pipes.yahoo then feeds this feed back to me and they give access to the XML file with the cross-domain-policy. Since this lives on their domain when I do a security check from Flash it accepts the RSS feed. You can view the feed pipe I used here generic input feed with catagories

The issue I encountered initially with pipes.yahoo was the output feed defaulted to removing the category tags from the blogger feed. I had already used these to organise my Flash site so had to figure out how to add a Rename module to add these back into the feed output.

You need to load and check for this cross_domain_policy.xml before it allows you to load in the RSS feed. This is needed in this case because the policy file isn’t at the default position, which is normally the root of your domain. With this method the location is at “http://pipes.yahooapis.com/crossdomain.xml”.

Style Sheet difference between AS3 Style Sheet class and the CSS at Blogger

There were many things different and incompatible with the loaded XML RSS feed. From difference in definition in the span tags, to odd ways blogger wraps sections of text. Even with basic html tags working with their Stylesheet but once again not compatible with Flash. This is because it is a form of XHTML from what I can gather.

The road I took was to bluntly do a few string hacks to get the xml file in an useful form. I pulled out the style sheet information, applied them to Style Sheet objects and re-wrap the span tags with something that that internal Flash Style Sheet class could associate with the created Style Sheet.

There is an 3rd party class that Adobe hosts called as3syndicationlib. Mike Chambers blog shows how to use this class. I had already done my own hack to the xml data before I stumble upon this. This article gave me the idea to use pipes.yahoo to solve the initial loading issues.

In all a lot of research, problem solving and work to achieve what I believe to be a great way to maintain and update content for a flash site.