Hosting Flash Games on Squarespace 6

For a while, I was actually able to upload the Flash games I've made to the Squarespace 6 servers and then link to them in a custom "code" block - but unfortunately, policies change, and all linked material started being served by Squarespace 6 with a content-disposition set to "attachment" - an attribute which apparently causes recent version of the Flash Player to ignore the Flash content!  I submitted various forum postings and help requests on this issue, and received nothing remotely helpful.  I've therefore decided to use Amazon Web Services' "S3" service, which lets you host simple web files up to a certain limit for free (and then afterwards you pay only according to the used bandwidth).  This also has the benefit of not forcing me to encode my Flash games as a single swf file, which in some cases would be gigantic. 

The general lesson, I think, is that if you are considering Squarespace 6 and are looking to do anything remotely sophisticated, give it careful thought.  The staff won't support you, and there may very well be problems with no solution.  It's a shame, given how much I enjoy the look of the templates and the simplicity of the content management system.

Chris Guin Creations Now at Squarespace 6

So I bit the bullet and moved my personal site to Squarespace.  I love the look and feel of the templates, the easy, intuitive content management system.  I like how clean and smooth everything feels.  It also gave me a nice excuse to clean house, so to speak - so I have not moved over everything from the old site - blogs that I never updated, for instance.  If there is something in particular you remember liking from the old site, feel free to shoot me an email and I'll see about getting it to you.​

There are a few things about Squarespace I'm not totally thrilled about, so it did take a lot of weighing and agonized decision making - there's no general FTP access (there might be with a Developer Account - I haven't taken a look into it), so Flash games that dynamically load in xml files and such are going to be a challenge to post.  Also, there are no subdomains, so if I want to create a separate site for one of my musicals it will probably have to be hosted elsewhere.  There might be ways around these restrictions - and if I find anything I'll be sure to let you know!​

Drawin' on the Walls to be Produced!

(Update: these dates are incorrect - we'll be getting you final dates soon!)

The F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company will be producing my new musical, Drawin' on the Walls, in May of 2013, at the Boston Playwright's Theatre!  The performance schedule should match their usual (although performances may be added if demand is high enough):

Friday, May 10 - 8 pm
Saturday, May 11 - 8 pm
Sunday, May 12 - 2 pm
Thursday, May 16 - 8 pm
Friday, May 17 - 8 pm
Saturday, May 18 - 8 pm

It's early yet, so I'll try to keep everyone updated as things progress!

Distinct Sidebars for Different Blogs in Squarespace 6

This is not going to be a technical blog, but just in case anyone out there is searching for a way to do this, I thought I'd share the solution I found.  It may look like Squarespace 6 only provides a single sidebar that is shared by all your blogs, but there is actually a way to get around it - you can use custom CSS.​

The basic principle is to add blocks for all your sidebars all together in one place, and then turn them visible or invisible based on which page you're looking at.​

​While editing your blog, if you go into Style Mode (the brush icon in the lower-right hand corner), you should see a CSS button appear in the lower left corner of your browser.  This lets you add custom CSS to the top of all of your pages.  Here's the CSS I added:

​#block-99e6fe148f38135539c0 {display:none;}
#block-a178391d0910821e59b1 {display:none;}

#collection-504c031ae4b087270c53d8e3 #block-a178391d0910821e59b1 {display:block;}
#collection-504b5b47e4b00e2aa82c8546 #block-99e6fe148f38135539c0 {display:block;}

.collection-504c031ae4b087270c53d8e3 #block-a178391d0910821e59b1 {display:block;}
.collection-504b5b47e4b00e2aa82c8546 #block-99e6fe148f38135539c0 {display:block;}

​The first two lines turn both sidebars invisible.  The next two lines turn the respective blocks visible when you are looking at the correct blog's main page.  The last two lines show the correct sidebar when you are looking at a subpage of the blog (solo post, comments, etc.).  The main trick is to figure out how to get those horrible looking numbers that represent the sidebar blocks and the blogs.  If you use your browser's "View Source" capability, and then search for the <sidebar> tag, you should find an id attribute that looks similar to the "block-#####" ids above.  The "collection-#####" ids represent the blogs themselves - if you look at the blog's <body> tag, the id should be in this format.

​Hope this is helpful to someone!

Chris Guin Creations is Moving to Squarespace - Maybe

I've decided to experiment with a website building service called Squarespace, and I really like it, for the most part. Although I have the ability to code my own websites, I neither have the energy nor the design instincts to meet my own expectations.  The Squarespace templates actually seem to be pretty classy and attractive by themselves.  There are a few things I've noticed that bug me, but I'll detail these more as I explore the possibilities.  The idea of managing my website with a very smooth and intuitive admin panel (rather than cpanel or WordPress or traditional content management panels) is quite attractive, even if I have to give up some control over how my website looks.  So here goes!