Skin of Stars

I posted this on oonagi, but thought it interesting enough to post here:

I do think that flash has a purpose, especially in sites that where it’s more important to have strong visual features, like band sites. For example, neverestsongs.co.uk is undeniably beautiful. But when we look at that instance, you cannot say that it is crawlable by seach engines. Yes, there are methods to ensure that search engines can index the pages, for example giving a site an HTML base and using flash for progressive enhancement (check to see if user can play flash), or alternatively using meta data to include keywords and content.

Perhaps we should take neverestsongs as an example. When we check the source code (ctrl+u) afters going directly to the site we see that:
a) the only meta data there is is the keywords: ‘music, luke, twyman, kent, england, english, uk’
b) it is displayed within a frame, with the actual site being stored on whitevinyldesign.com/newnnev, a page without any further content for search engines to crawl

So far as search engine optimisation goes, both these (very good looking) sites are not being indexed properly by search engines… or so the common belief goes. Still, with a little digging you will find that Google does index flash pages! Apparently they use a search engine indexer provided by Adobe (the owners of flash) which they can use (though one would guess they have to front up some hard cash). You still have to be careful how you build your page and should check it against Adobe’s swf2html output but you can now rest a little easier that you will show up in search results, well, google’s search results. A quick search on flash and seo will yield a wealth of information.

Now, is flash the industry standard? I am certain that it is for creative industries but I did feel the need to check the top 10 global websites to see how much they used flash. For this I used Alexa.com, and checked their global rankings. Of the top five sites (Yahoo, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace) at least some use flash, but they only use it as embedded players with XHTML sites. Funnily enough, this drops of dramatically as you go through the rankings of the top twenty. So the big players do use flash, but its sporadic and only as a small part of their site. If you look through their code though they seem to be doing all their fancy eye-candy with javascript (facebook make extensive use of javascript, as do google).

So here is my conclusion. So far as problems caused for search engines, this isn’t the issue it always used to be. You still need to take a little care but it’s certainly not something for a client to be concerned about. My other question, is it the industry standard? That depends on what kind of site you want. For the large sprawling behemoths it clearly isn’t appropriate, else they would be making far more extensive us of it. If you’re in creative industries (like a band, or an artist) and you want a good site that captures your audience, then flash is the way to go.

I’m back in Oxford now and to be honest I’m glad. It was nice to be in Thanet, see old friends, that sort of thing but I’m eager to get on with learning. I didn’t really do much more than drink and watch TV in Thanet, being home makes me instantly lazy. I had three boy projects that I wanted to do in my month off…

1. Re-build the Manston Garden Club website. I knocked a really shaky one together a year or so ago and I was never impressed in the slightest with it. I always thought it looked like one of those ‘welcome to my webpage’ sites (google it). This project I did based on wordpress and its kinda ok now. If you like you can see it at manstongardenclub.co.uk

2. Re-skin and re-organise oonagi. It looks awful at the moment; cluttered, not very user friendly and lots of pointless pages. I have now done most of the design on a test site but I’m still some way from sorting it enough to go live. It will still be based on the e107 system with changes being almost entirely cosmetic. This should give the least jolt to the users who have already been through many changes on the site over the past seven years.

3. Develop Thanet Blog List Build a geographically specific collectively edited news site. Basically a reddit/digg/newsvine for Thanet, as well as being portable to other areas. This will probably be based on a system like Pligg but unfortunately I can’t get it to work on my current webhost (they are a little backwards on the technology side) and am going to have to buy more webspace elsewhere. I don’t have enough money till February so you’ll have to wait I’m afraid. The idea came out of some brainstorming for the new Blog List build. As there were so many new blogs popping up I thought that the current approach, just posting them as blog entries, was restrictive. My ‘vision’ was that everyone adds new blogs and every gets to vote on whether its and good or not This should help filter out the one-post-wonders as well as letting the average reader quickly find the authoritative blogs. Even better, I wanted the user to have the possibility of having their own account where they can have feeds from their favourites, a little like netvibes, thus saving time from visiting all blogs as well as being able to see at a glance whether there are any new posts. Alas, I couldn’t really get it together and quite frankly its not my project any more anyway. I think its current new design is pretty cool and it wouldn’t be difficult to get a latest entry feed page on it with all the blogs listed.

So I managed about one and a half out of three projects. Thats not a very good ratio in my eyes. Lots of thoughts, lots of talk but not enough action. At least I’m more productive here in Oxford so hopefully we’ll see some more results shortly.

I don’t seem to do this very often, maybe time for a bit of an update.

Summer for me is pretty much over now, but it was a good one. I took just over a week off work for folk week (yes, the whole week and yes, I know the words to the clarence the dragon song) where I plied my way through many beers. It wasn’t the best year, bit of a washout at first, but it was still very good. I even managed to get in some fireclub passing going on the beach on the wednesday. I normally do alot of cicus type stuff at folk week, but I didn’t so much this year. Probably got my yearly fix doing a circus workshop for Manston village fete a couple of weeks before.

Much of my folkweek was taken up with flyering for a gig I was holding on the Sunday in Westgate which was called the Thanet Rocks End Of Summer Bash. Thanet Rocks being the recent tagline for oonagi… probably drop that a bit now as its been hammered pretty hard. Anyway, the idea of the gig was to have a bit of a festival of local original music. We had seven local bands and artists doing their own thing and all the money we made went to charity. We raised around £375 for Thanet Mind, whoop! Thats the summary, if you want to know all the trials and tribulations that went into it, plus a rundown of the day then a full write-up on The Gig 06 link at the top of oonagi. Right at the moment I’m working on a mini-site bonus feature of a DVD thats being made of the day. We’ll be selling them in the hope of raising a bit more money for the aforementioned worthy charity.

Other than that I’m preparing to go to uni in september. Oxford Brookes to study computers and culture for three years. This has raised a concern with my role in oonagi. I do so much work on the site that I’m a bit worried at having to let it go. I’ll still help out but I’m not going to be local, which is one of the fundamentals of oonagi.

Ok, see you again in…. who knows \m/(^_^)\m/

myspace, myspace… oh god, myspace

I’ve never been the biggest fan of myspace, as anyone who’s had to listen to me would know. Still, it is THE biggest social networking site on the internet with over 85million ‘users’. So in view of this I’ve finally given in and set up an oonagi myspace. If you want to visit it you can, the URL is myspace.com/thanetrocks. A friend of ours is doing a zine of the local scene called Thanet Rocks. As this is also the tagline for oonagi it only seemed sensible that we combined forces, so this myspace thing is a combo of the two. We’re also planning on a load of story sharing between the site and the zine. Paper and online, how about that for coverage and appealing to all sorts. A thought, there really should be a Thanet Times/Gazunder website.