ClickTag script for designers

For some reason I’ve been getting lots of calls and mails from friends and clients about clickTag’s and how they work. I noticed that allot of people have trouble understanding the concept of it. I get requests for a clicktag implementation and then 1 day later they send you the link it needs to refer to to be embedded in the flash file…
Then you have the 3rd party that has to place the banner on some site and who claims that the clickTag doesn’t work, then after looking at the html you see that the flashvar set is “clickTAG”, “clicktag” or “clickTag”. Because allot of people involved in this banner terror have no programming or scripting experience they don’t know that upper and lower case have a different interpretation. Then if they do get it they sometimes get misinformed by the documentation. I’ve seen multiple documents that were composed from different sources that use “clickTAG” in the HTML example then “_root.clickTag” in actionscript.. so no wonder that it doesn’t work.

I grew a bit tired of these endless discussions with people that don’t understand how it works so I wrote a small script that pleases all people involved.

The script allowes you to set a backupLink for the banner so if no link is placed in a clickTag it still redirects you to the embedded link. This you can use to please you partner company that keeps sending you links while you only need to place a clickTag.

Then we have the different notations “clickTag”, “clickTAG” and “clicktag”, the scripts runs trough all the options and uses one as soon if it finds a link in one of these variables.

Another extra thing I added is an optional flashVar that can be placed to set the target of the link, by default this is a new window (”_blank”) but ofcourse can also be set to “_self” or a different target.

So how do you use this?

Well you download the clickTag.as file, create a new layer in your Flash document on root level and paste the following code as frame action:

var backupLink:String = "http://www.somelink.com/page.html";
#include "clickTag.as"

Replace the backupLink with your own link. Then you create your button that needs to activate the link and give it the instance name “hitZone” (case sensitive).

Source files

Tutorial: Scripted Scene Selection - DVD Studio Pro 4

In this tutorial I describe how you can make a scene selection in DVD Studio Pro (DVDSP) without having to make all the connections by hand. The big advantage of doing this is that you can modify the behavior of all the buttons in one script and you won’t accidently set a wrong link.

Dowload Tutorial [<1.0 mb](current version is Dutch, english coming up)
Download DVDSP Project [1.0 mb].