New Sony Rolly in Motion

The Searchable Swf

A big problem when using flash on a website has been seo. It was generally a bad idea to use flash for any main content or navigation on a site, search engines would not recognize it. Flash has always been a way to add movement to a site. Many websites took full advantage of this and went full flash. In the early days some would hide search engine keywords under a flash swf to get searched on. This would become an exploited technique and Google later frowned upon. Earlier this year, Adobe came out with a way for flash applications to allow text and links inside of the flash player to get index by search engines.

Adobe has created a special Flash Player that allows search engines to run through the application and translate the content into something search friendly. This being said, it still poses a problem for back linking. Since a flash site generally keeps a single URL during a single site visit, back linking to a particular page in the flash application is virtually impossible. A site might get index for the flash content, but it will still manage to have a hard time getting up in the search engines.

Probably the best rule to keep when using flash would be to use it wisely. Do not use flash navigation or full website. It should accent a page, not dominate it. Maybe one day flash will be fully searchable by search engines, but until then its safer to stay away from SEO Swf.

For more information on Adobe’s searchable swf, please check it out here.

For more information on Google’s searchable swf, please check it out here.

CSSing the PNG

Are png’s the best way to go with the current browser standards?

The answer is yes and no, depending on what your layout looks like and what you need the png for.
There are tons of hacks and tricks to make a png file work cross browser, but is it worth it for all the hacks you have to set up. Not to mention it can still be a bit buggy in the end. Pngs tend to be used for gradients that fade into a transparent edge or just plain transparency. If you have ever tried to use a transparent gif, it can look a bit pixilated. Pngs create a very clean looking transparent edges. This would be a great way to add images to your website, if only it would work cross-browser. The wonderful IE has a hard time supporting it. There are many fixes for this, but it tends to work as background images or just hard coded images on the page.

A List Apart offers some viable solutions here.

However, I noticed that png’s used in backgrounds of a:hover tend to “flicker” on roll over. I am sure there are tons of ways to get this in working order, but at the end of the day I do not want to clutter the page with excess code or more client bogging JavaScript. I will keep my fingers cross for a day where all browsers handle it the same. Maybe we’ll get some positioning fixes with padding and margins in that as well.

Sorry I offer no real solution, just my rant on this wonderful file type.

IE opens url in FireFox

So a weird issue I was having today, I was downgrading my IE to version 6 for some design testing. When I typed in the url for a site and hit enter, the site would open in Fire Fox. After searching through many help sites, I came across the fix.

1. Open your cmd prompt (run>type regedit>enter).
2. Find this entry (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\ {c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6}).
3. Delete the entry.
4. Close Regedit and you’re done.

You can read more on it here.