Last week I bought a new monitor. It was the perfect time because we were shopping for maternity clothes which meant that money was being spent on my wife and I could sneak in a request of my own. Now, instead of the 13" monitor from 1998 that I have been using for 6 years, I have a nice 17" CRT with a flat screen. I wish that it was one of the nifty LCD thin monitors, but I will take it one step at a time.

But, with a new monitor in hand, I have been more eager to update my Web site. I have spent the weekend looking for a nice Flash slideshow that I can use to show off my photos. There are plenty out there, but most involved lots of complicated JavaScript and very little Flash.

Finally, I found a very nice Flash interface that uses an XML document to pass the URL location of pictures to a movie clip with the Flash movie. Simple and elegant, the perfect solution. I spent most of today customizing the interface shell, then dropped in the script and tried it out.

Nothing happened. Actually something happened but not what I wanted. The interface shell came up for a second, then the whole thing disappeared. If I remove the XML document from its reference area the interface shell shows up -- but it doesn't have any pictures.

I made some headway in getting the example to work (you can see it in the Picturing section of my site) but can't get mine to work. I think that it either has something to do with the XML.Onload function or the movie clip I am trying to load to.
If anyone has ideas, I would love to hear them. Otherwise, I will keep fiddling until I get it right. And once I do, I am going to post some pictures... finally.