Positioning MCs according to height

[greenpear]

I need to create the attached jpg, but i'm not sure of the best way to tackle it.

The news posts are loaded from XML and will vary in height so they need to somehow be sorted so that if one is going to come off the page, then it's put into the next page - where the user will click the scroll buttons to view.

Would something like this be a good way to tackle this?

1/ Load article from XML
2/ Create a postMC_0 and add article bits to it (date, title, body)
3/ Record height
4/ Create a newsColumn_0 and add postMC_0 to it

Then a loop:

5/ Load next article

6/ Create a postMC_1 and add article bits to it

7/ If difference between postMC_0 height and newsColumn_0 height is greater than the height of postMC_1, then add postMC_1 to newsColumn_0.

8/ If not, then create newsColumn_1 and add postMC_1 to it.

9/ Loop back to 5 (increasing the numbers each time, so postMC_2, etc)


Then just make the scroll buttons function according to how many columns have been created..


Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.