April Fool Template

April Fool is just around a corner. I just decided of doing another round of template changes. Got a bit bored with my previous template already. It’s not really a total template revamp, but as before, it’s the template header change.

There were a few time, when I changed my template, people asking me on whether I do the header myself. Well, the answer is YES and NO.

YES I create the header file myself and format it so that it fit in my blog template. NO I didn’t design the banner. I usually steal it somewhere and modify it with my bits and pieces. I am not computer artist that can produce something this beautiful. But I am computer enthusiast. So just apply a little of hacking skills, then you get things done.

So this entry will illustrate what processes that I usually go before I have my template changed, errmmmm well, my template header changed.

For any occasion, the best place that you can go to find a beautiful flash file for the season in electronic greeting card website. This time, I went to 123 Greetings website. Voila. It has a dedicated section on April Fool. After browsing around, I have found the flash animation that ticks my hearts.

Without further ado, I view the greeting card. Well. It’s really nice. Using Firefox media browser from Page Info dialog, you can browse the list of the media of the current page that you are viewing. That flash animation is a .swf type of file. By looking into the list, I saved the .swf file of that greeting card.

The next part is where it started to get a bit dirty. The .swf file can be think of as a compiled program already. In order for you to to be able to edit what is inside, you have to reverse engineer so that the source file is produced out of it. Once you have raw source file, you can do anything to it.

At this stage, I’m using Sothink SWF Decompiler. This this software does is, it opens .swf file, and reconstruct .fla file from it.

Once you have .fla file, you can do anything with it. So I use Macromedia Flash to edit it. Here, you need to be familiar with Macromedia Flash, things like layer, frame, shape, tweening and action script. I’m not pro myself with Macromedia Flash too. But little – little can la.

So, I just put my lacking creativity here to remove unwanted shapes and unwanted frames from the file. There are also several scenes. Usually, I just keep the last one, the part that repeated over and over.

After I’ve done with the editing, here is my final look.

So after exporting this back to .swf file, it’s time to place this into the template. With a simple math of finding the width and height of several DIVs in pixels, I managed to fit in this flash into my template.

And that’s all about it.

View my other template changes

• Aquarium fish
• Have a great weekend
• On Vacation
• April Fool
• Bubble Bear
• M’re Goes Dirty
• Chinese New Year 2006
• Happy New Year 2006
• Christmas 2005
• Fish
• More template tweaks
• Scroller added
• Template finalized

View my past template header in action at
http://www.mohdimran.com/_blog_header_/