Making Flash Search Engine Friendly

http://internet.ducttapemarketing.com/2005/06/making_flash_se.html

(Actually, the most interesting thing about this post is the comment!)

Flash: 99% good?

I found on the Adobe website, a book called “Flash 99% good“, an answer to Jakob Nielsen’s article. There even is a website about the book, but the book is so old (2002) that the website is not about it anymore and it’s probably not up-to-date. However, it would have been interesting to see what information and advice the book was providing, but the customer reviews on Amazon about the book are VERY bad.

An Object lesson for Flash developers

I just LOVE developing flash applications with Object-Oriented ActionScript.

It makes the code so much easier to understand when you need to debug it!

It also solves the problem of scope. The most important element in Flash is the MovieClip, which can contain several other MovieClips and so on and so forth. Thus, should you need to access one of them from another one, you quickly get lost and spend hours tearing your own hair. With Object-Oriented Programming, you define a proper structure for your application and make it easier to retrieve items.

One you have defined what you want to see on screen, your animations and interactions, it’s very easy to write your classes and make them work with each other. Easier than going with the usual procedural way and not giving any structure to your application.

It’s going to save me so much time!!!

That’s Cake on Cake!

A couple of months ago, I heard about frameworks for PHP. I was like “What is it for?” and “Whatever” and also “I don’t have time for new developer gadgets”.

And then, Pascal, a freelance web developer, spent a couple of weeks working on a project at my agency, and he used CakePHP. He had never used it before but he could master it in one day! He showed me a bit how it worked and I was very happy to know about it because, actually, I thought about developing something like that, I wanted it to be my project for uni. Thank God I didn’t do it because it would have been a waste of time, since it already exists! And it is better than what I would have done.

With CakePHP, you design a database, call the “bake.php” script and it writes your entire application! Forms to add, edit, list or delete your items are all done! And you can customize them quite easily. Also, the server rewrites URLs to make them safer, more search-engine friendly and more elegant.

So, I started testing it with a simple application to make articles with images and, er… it took me a bit more than one day to understand how it works but I got it now (even if I still have a couple of weird messages when I edit an article but at least, it doesn’t crash!).

I’m definitely going to use it for jujupiter.com. And this URL thing can work with Flash, thus, my application will be more accessible!