Yes Petunia, there is a frogans address registration affiliation program. Even for people in Virginia.

It’s like this: STG Interactive develops the Frogans Player. STG Interactive lets people download and use the Frogans Player for free (without even asking for their email address).

STG Interactive writes the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL) and posts the specifications without obligation for whoever wants to use them for authoring frogans.

STG Interactive invests oodles and oodles in technology and servers for the Main Frogans Network to which millions of Frogans Players on the computers of millions of Internet users world-wide may connect simultaneously 24/7 for locating millions of frogans by their frogans addresses on the Internet – for free?

With one exception: A frogans on the Internet requires a frogans address in order for it to be accessible. And you have to pay when you register a frogans address. But it’s cheap. 12 bucks for a year’s registration (20 bucks for two) is cheap. This is STG Interactive’s sole source of revenue (no adware, no private information collecting). I’m not going to suggest what kind of numbers are on the line, but STG Interactive will have to register gobs and gobs and heaps and heaps of frogans addresses to keep the motor running.

This is where the fun begins. Every new frogans on the Internet is an additional reason to download and install the Frogans Player. Every additional person who has installed the Frogans Player on their computer, be it running Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X, is one more reason to be publishing a frogans.

So if you’ve already registered a frogans address and have taken the time, effort and all-out passion to author a frogans worthy of the cause, you’re probably keen to the idea of your frogans having a lot of visitors. As your visitors in turn will want to get the most out of their shiny new Frogans Player, they will probably encourage more people to register frogans addresses who will in turn create more useful and entertaining frogans to be visited. This self-propagation of the Frogansphere (don’t look it up in Wikipedia, it’s a new word) results in there being more Frogans Player-enabled users ready to visit and navigate your frogans. May the circle be unbroken.

But at the time of this posting, the Frogansphere is tiny. In fact, it’s pre-natal, waiting for the upcoming Frogans technology release. But since we want our Frogansphere to grow up big and strong, it’s good to know that there is a frogans address affiliation program in the works to encourage the early nourishment and continued nutrition that it needs.

Here’s how it’s going to work: Once the program becomes operational you’ll be able to enroll into the frogans address registration affiliate program at the Commission Junction website (in the meantime, check out the Community page at frogans.com). There, you will be able to choose from a variety of text and banner ad links for frogans address registration that you put on your website, blog or emails. Every time someone registers a frogans address after following one of your links, not only does the Frogansphere get a little heftier and healthier, but you get a 10% commission. That comes out to $1.20 for a one-year registration, $2.00 for a two-year registration.

A couple zillion of those and the Frogansphere is off to college.

Note: Commission Junction should not be confused with “Conjunction Junction”, Bob Dorough’s Schoolhouse Rock boogie-woogie masterpiece.

I’m off to Brittany for a couple of weeks of sun and rain. This will be accompanied by a low pressure front on my end of the blogsphere, resulting in reduced output until I get back (around the 6th of August). Stay cool and dry.

Inching towards the final stages of the development of the new Frogans Player, STG-Interactive has now started finalizing the Frogans Slide Description Language 3.0 (FSDL 3.0) specifications for publication.

This is the easy part, according to Alexis. It’s kind of like putting up the road signs now that the streets have been paved. Now that the Frogans Player has its rendering capabilities encoded, we’re establishing the means for telling it what to do. Working on the new FSDL feels like coming down the home stretch.

The last version to be published, FSDL 2.1 is looking more and more like that distant cousin that you knew when you were a kid, but who you saw less and less of as you grew up, and now you wouldn’t recognize if you were standing at the same bus stop. FSDL 3.0 is a major upgrade.

From what I’ve seen FSDL 3.0 will be a lot more intuitive, and simpler as well. I think that the new specifications will be a hair shorter than those for version 2.1, but no promises. More importantly, there has been a rethinking about how FSDL-created and associated elements are defined and placed in frogans slides.

In both the new and in previous versions of FSDL, resources, being associated images, vector elements , gradient fills and text elements (respectively SETIMAGE, SETDRAW, SETPIXELS and SETTEXT elements in version 2.1) are first defined so as to furnish something of a resource library. Each resource can then be used as needed, and in as many occurrences* as necessary. Occurrences can be resized, rotated, have masks and filters (e.g. blur, opacity, shadows, color effects, etc.) applied to them, and may be used themselves as masks for other objects.

In prior versions of FSDL the on-screen size of an image, text, etc., wouldn’t be defined until the moment at which they’d be “placed” on the frogans slide, in the CONTENT element, or applied as a mask for an other occurrence, in the MASK element. A CONTENT element occurrence would be sized with respect to an 800 x 600 unit grid representing the surface of a frogans slide (remember that in pixel units, the maximum rendered size of a frogans slide at its maximum zoom is 320 x 240). The size of a mask would be determined as a proportionate to the size of the occurrence that it masked. (The way of defining text resources, while simple, didn’t leave a lot of room for easy reformatting – but I’ll talk about that another day. Let’s just say for now that it’s greatly improved.)

It was agreed that a simpler approach was needed, so we worked towards the idea that the resources should be defined from the start with their sizes among their attributes, and that it will probably be in pixel units with respect to a frogans slide’s maximum zoom size (320 x 240). This follows the reasoning that people who publish frogans will generally think about their graphics and such in terms of the pixels they occupy on-screen and at their maximum zoom size. This runs somewhat counter to the idea that frogans are ultimately pixel-independent, which allows for their real-time resizing on screen, but it seemed to be a better way to go for easy authoring. Not only that, but apparently it has helped for more simple and concise coding in the Frogans Player.

Other neat stuff:

Goodbye SHAPE element, hello anti-aliased exterior contours. – The SHAPE element defined the general mask, or over-all shape, of each frogans slide, without anti-aliasing. This was reasonable before operating systems started moving towards putting semi-transparent objects in the user interface. Now it’s become the standard, allowing windows to have shadows and rounded, anti-aliased corners, widgets that look like they’re etched in smoked glass, and yup, frogans that have shadows, and look like they’re etched in smoked Waterford Crystal (let us not be one-upped by a mere widget). With all this transparency and anti-aliasing going around, the SHAPE element started being more trouble than it was worth.

Exterior shadows. – For the forementioned reasons, it’s groundhog day for frogans.

Type – The typographic fonts that you choose when you format your text will be from the selection of fonts embedded in the Frogans Player, and not those found on your operating system. This assures that the text in your frogans will be displayed exactly as you formatted it regardless of the end-user’s operating system configuration. You can be sure that your type will be displayed correctly if you’re writing in Cyrillic, Navajo, Kanji, Thai, even English. Someone remind me to publish the full list of international character sets one of these days.

Goodbye PID, hello forms. – FSDL 2.1 allowed for the use of a personal identifier (PID), or login, as well as a password if the author wished to restrict the access to a frogans. For instance, when you visited such a frogans a login window would appear where you would enter your PID and a password. With FSDL 3.0, a more flexible system implementing forms that are opened in separate windows has made this feature obsolete.

* I use the word “occurrence” whereas the existing FSDL specifications use the word “content”.

The Frogans Player is an amazing piece of software, if only for it’s image-processing capabilities.

I come from a graphics background. I’ve been pushing pixels around for so long, it’s not even cool. A result of all this bloody experience is that I’ve now a lot of preconceptions about how images should be prepared and finalized before they can be considered “ready”. Ready for print, ready for multimedia, ready to go.

For instance, say I’m designing a web page. I’ll probably start out by getting creative with a pencil and paper, drawing the basic elements. Before long I’ll find myself in either Illustrator or Photoshop putting a more finalized look together. As I get further into the production, the less room I have to create spontaneously.

Now comes the glorious moment when I like what I see (and my client likes it too). At this point I think about how I’m going to slice it up into pieces which will be easily utilized in HTML. Imagine cutting into a decorated birthday cake. Creation is over, consumption begins.

This last week I’ve been helping out with the writing of the next major version of the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s meant looking closely at its basic principals, and it’s helped me realize that with FSDL you can extend the creative process further into the productive end when authoring frogans.

The Frogans Player is, in part, image manipulation software. That means that I can lighten, darken, rotate and flip, stretch and repeat, assign layers and masks to my images at the FSDL coding phase of my work. In effect, I can write into an FSDL source document commands for performing all sorts of image processing. These image processing tasks will be performed by the Frogans Player on the end-user’s computer when they navigates to that frogans.

This opens the door to new options in the creative process. Whereas before I would concentrate on having a maximum of visual resources handy to meet my varying production needs, I can now start thinking about minimizing my resources and getting the maximum effect out of them on the end-user’s side in real time. This also allows me more creative options, even when I’m far down the production line.

Say I want to put a roll-over effect on a button. With FSDL I’m not obliged to create a separate visual element for each button state. I can simply create one button image and with FSDL treat it differently depending on mouse behavior. For instance, I might change its opacity, hue, lightness, contrast, rotation, size, shadow presence and disposition, etc. when the mouse passes over it. This way, not only do I reduce the number and variety of image files associated with my frogans, but I now have fewer images to manage and update when I modify the structure and look of my frogans.

This is also good news for those who will create frogans using server applications because visual effects can be applied dynamically. For instance, let’s say that I wanted to make a frogans that highlighted the number of winter holiday fat burning days left before the first day of summer. On the appropriate slide I could generate a progress bar. In FSDL this progress bar could actually be a mask for a photo of a volleyball tournament in Malibu, a progress bar that extends to the right with each passing day, complete with a gradient overlay which turns from cold-blue to searing red. My only graphic resource here is the photo. The rest can be written in FSDL, manageable by a server application.

For the “casual” froganizer (Aunt Peg’s decorated birthday cake frogans – 101 unique designs), they know that they have a palette of options at their disposal even if their visual resources are limited. They can fit that picture into that frame, tweak the color, make that text fit just right… On second thought, don’t get me talking about text manipulation. Not today. That’s another (fascinating) subject, and you want to get on to the next entry.