Wildly Appropriate

MySpace Bling... Now With Less Bling

Jan 24, 07:38 PM

Today my colleague and I created some MySpace bling to help promote an upcoming Rob Bell Q+A session that will be followed by the first ever showing of a not-yet-out-on-DVD NOOMA film that our company is helping to create. The first stop on this tour is Ann Arbor, Michigan and we're hoping that some UM/yspi/arbor-ites will help spread the news by using this flash flyer gizmo we cooked up:

After playing with some HTML options and recognizing that MySpace doesn't allow JavaScript on user profile pages, I recommended that we implement this thing in Flash. Pretty sweet, no? Only here's the thing: much to my and other well-meaning geeks surprise, MySpace recently decided to cripple the use of something called getURL in flash widgets - which is the method we use to link from flash to other webpages. Which means the whole flippin' point of the piece is now in question. This same widget on a given MySpace page cannot hyperlink out to the tour's website the way I programemed it to... only to other MySpace pages. Which stinks.

Who's got the solution here? In our case with this flash flyer we've created, the point is more to spread the flyer than to drive traffic to the site, so maybe we'll survive. But c'mon Rupert... let us link!!