XanaduWest.com is my personal photography site. I did all of the design and coding, and of course all the photography.

XanaduWest has quite a few features that are very rare for a Flash RMA.

Firstly, it is bookmarkable. As you browse through the photos the Actionscript is communicating with the browser via Javascript to make updates to the location bar - window.location.hash. If you are looking at a particular photo and bookmark the page or copy the URL and email it to someone then they will come to the very same photo. As the page loads it looks for any arguments added onto the URL. If they are there then the data there is used to load the corresponding photo. Otherwise it randomly picks a category/subcategory to display.

There is an email feature here that uses the same URL code so that you can email a group of photos to someone. When they click on one of those photos it will bring them straight to the one they are looking at.

The navigation and all photo data are contained in an XML file. So if I want to add a photo to a gallery or create a whole new gallery then I don’t need to make any changes at all to the Flash file. All I need to do is add a few lines to the XML, upload it and the photos to the server and I’m done.

To make things even easier on myself I used the DrawingAPI in Flash to make all the frames around the photos. That saves a lot of work later on Photoshop. So that frame with the beveled edges is all just lines drawn programmatically in Flash.

Lastly, I have used LocalObjects to store data about the current state of the RMA. If you change the volume level of the music it will be remembered when you return. It also checks to see which photos have been stored to be emailed. If you leave and return those same selected photos will be there ready for you to email to yourself or a friend. This functionality can easily be extended to become a shopping cart if I ever decide to sell prints again.

And please, stay long enough to see the sunset. People say that it’s beautiful.