you just need something to make you smile
Flash to get better indexing in search engines
Caleb / July 1, 2008, 8:26 am
Adobe has finally publicly acknowledged their very important problem with SEO and Flash and has made an effort to make Flash content easier for search engines (specifically Yahoo! and Google) to index by collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!.
From the press release:
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
Read more in the press release
While I do see this as an great thing, I would still recommend developers use SWFAddress to ensure deep linking to your content. I can see how both search engines would be able to pick up the content properly, but it would surprise me if the indexing is able to tell a user where that content lives within the site. It will be interesting to see how the content is indexed.
Colin Moock interviews Jim Corbett
Caleb / May 22, 2008, 11:13 am
A really nice interview with one of the flash player engineers. They talk about ecmascript 4, the future of the web browser, silverlight, actionscript 3, web politics, etc. It’s really worth a watch (or listen in my case).
via colin’s blog
Processing.js
Caleb / May 9, 2008, 10:16 am
John Resig just ported over the Processing project to Javascript. Some really cool demos are coming out of it.
It’s some pretty amazing stuff.
via kottke.org > via waxy
flash projects
Caleb / April 7, 2008, 5:31 pm
While perusing the ever important osflash.org in preparation for some upcoming flash work, I came across some really great open source flash projects I thought might be interesting to some.
- movie masher
Facilitates easy navigation of video, audio and image assets as well as effects, transitions and themes. Media can simply be dragged into the timeline for inclusion in a mash. - swf address
A small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax - ajax animator
Ajax Animator is a free open source web based flash ide designed for simplicity and community effort.
The only issue I have with osflash is that a lot of the projects are out-dated and not removed or tagged as being so, and it can become difficult to figure out if it is still applicable.
Further evidence that Apple is the new Microsoft.
Caleb / April 4, 2008, 8:50 am
Recently it has been in the press that Apple has said they will not put the Flashplayer onto the iPod touch or the iPhone because they say the lite version isn’t good enough for the iPhone. Adobe then said they were going to make a player anyways using the newly released SDK, but quickly realized they couldn’t due to the extreme limitations of the SDK (more here).
At any rate, as the flash guy around here, I was not particularly surprised or thrilled at this news. On further reflection though, I realized the truth – what I am now calling the “Apple Flash Conspiracy.” There have been rumors of Netflix using the newest version of the Flashplayer (which supposedly has DRM capability built in) to start streaming their movies on Apple computers. Apple, now in the movie renting business, stands to lose potential business by allowing this to happen. If I can already watch movies using a subscription I’m already paying for, why rent from iTunes? If they can prevent it from happening on the iPod and iPhone, the better for them.
I realize this is most likely not what is happening, but it’s still something to think about.
follow the pass
Caleb / March 27, 2008, 10:37 am
A great PSA out of the UK about paying attention to cyclists. It’s an interesting lesson about focus and how it changes your view of the overall picture.
the source dothetest
my new favorite firefox extension
Caleb / March 13, 2008, 8:33 am
I was recently viewing my friends list on flickr and was once again it was taking to long to load each page. In my frustration, I went looking for a firefox add-on to ease my pain and I found quite possibly the best add-on ever.
It’s an add-on for popular sites that use images - google image search, facebook, myspace, flickr, etc. - that searches on all the related images and loads in just the images. Although its taking over your entire screen is a little intrusive, it’s extremely fast, and that’s what I was looking for. Now when I go to my friend’s photos page, I can view all the photos at once.
The only thing I would like to see added is the ability to go to the page where it found the image or at least give some data on where the image is coming from.
css and rollovers
Caleb / March 11, 2008, 8:36 am
I’ve recently stopped using javascript to do rollovers when reasonable. It’s much nicer because you don’t have to write onmouseover or onmouseout events, and it works without javascript. It’s also prevents a weird ‘blink’ (especially in IE) when rolling over if the image isn’t loaded in cache.
The trick is to create one image that has both states and assign the background-position of the hover state.
Using the following image and css, you don’t have to worry about javascript.
a.seeMore {
background: #dce1e4
url(/images/icons/arrowFull.gif)
no-repeat top right;
}
a.seeMore:hover {
background-color:#4f5a62;
background-position:right -18px;
}