Missing main .fla to my site :(

[C.S. Murphy]

Well I’m uber flipping pissed off at the moment. I have made some new creations that I wanted to update in my news section only to find that the main .fla that I created my Flash site in is no longer present in the back up section of my external drive.

  Needless to say I have no way of updating the content or creating anything new for the site that took me the better half of 6 months to plan out. So now I’m forced to create some kind of sloppy second site just to get my stuff out there.

  Time to break open the bottle of Grey Goose in the back of my freezer….. Ugh.
Does anyone know a way around this?

    I would hate to start from scratch again. 

[Cel]

Ouch. I know the feeling.

You might wanna improve your site now that you have a chance, and make the content dynamic. You could make an administration panel (php or something) to add content, and the .swf would read it and always stay up to date. Much easier to handle things this way, and you're not screwed if you lose a file. Besides, if you make a site for a client, he doesn't know flash or how to update your .fla. Might be a useful skill to know how to make your sites dynamic.

[C.S. Murphy]

Hey thanks for your feedback Cel.

I have been thinking that perhaps this is a sign that I should be re-thinking the over all essence and concept behind the site. I suck at programming though. You think my actionscripting is bad.... I can't even imagine getting into php unless the basics were as easy as learning AS.

A lot of people complain that the site loads waaay slowly and I completely concure with that. It's just that it took so freaking long to get this one off the ground, I don't even know when I'll be able to have another crack at making a proper site. 

[Cel]

Well, here's your chance to learn. I can help you if you run into problems, and designing the site code-wise.

[Pieter]

Well, you could just make a simple HTML site and use some flash to spice things up. Unless you want a complete Flash site.
To be quite frank I've allways prefered a simple and fast loading html site over the ones completely made in flash.

[Cel]

It kinda depends on the purpose of the site. If you're building a "serious" site, like ebay, or youtube, flash isn't the best choice, but if you want to showcase you work, or a product, Flash is ideal.

How heavy the site gets depends on how well it's written. For example, if instead of having hardcoded images in your site they'd only load if and when the user needs to see them, you could reduce the size of the swf dramatically. Vector graphics of buttons, icons and any other design elements you want in there take very little space, and the swf would be reduces to mere KBs. Also, when loading the content, the site doesn't have to wait until everything is loaded. If it takes a lot of time to load all the content, you could display what has been loaded so far. It's not any faster, but it gives the user something to do/look at, and the impression the site loads fast.