Kevin Carmody: machines, media & miscellanea

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.

Hey, just wanted to highlight an article in Kent Online that my friend Jay linked me to. Its about a pair of local artists who are trying to bring a little love to Margate this Valentines Day. The main reason I’m bringing this up is that I know the work of one of them, Selina Tolfree, and I very much like what she does. Because of that I’m urging you all to hunt out her work where you can (I’ll try to update with links at some point) and have a look for yourselves.

Very interesting and well made video about (cue buzzword) web 2.0

Those lovely guys at EA have open-sourced the SimCity code for use on OLPC, except the actual name SimCity, which we must now call Micropolis. I’m afraid to say that it’s only available for Linux at the moment but I’m sure its only a matter of time till someone ports it to Windows.

For the time being the .deb can be found here:
http://www.getdeb.net/app.php?name=Micropolis

Or you could build it from source for your own nix system from here:
http://www.donhopkins.com/home/micropolis/

Its got to that time of the month where I have to reinstall my operating system. I can’t blame the system, it is each and every time, without fail, my fault. I can’t help but keep tinkering and playing with them till they fail on me. I remember when I first started playing with the things I would have to reinstall before I’d even finished the first install! At least now here are often months between.

I thought this time I might get out of my comfort zone for a bit. I decided to install the new fedora 8. I will be totally honest now and admit that it lasted on my machine for two days before I switched back to ubuntu. The problem wasn’t with fedora per say, I could see almost immediately that this was a far more stable operating system with many of the features I like built in straight out the box. It clearly benefits from the good breeding of Red Hat. The problem I have is that I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination and fedora is clearly built for people who have some idea what they are doing. From what I found there seemed to be very little documentation for novices and to be honest I don’t have the time for that sort of learning curve.

So here is what seems to have happened. I have acquired the same disinterest in learning a new operating system that my Windows using counterparts have always had. I hope this doesn’t stick.

These machines aren’t all fun fun fun, sometimes you have to use them for some more serious work. In this post I’m going to tell you how to make your own php/mysql web development environment on your own Ubuntu desktop. Once you’ve done this you won’t need to keep uploading files to your server just to check if something works.

Firstly I’d like to point to the post that originally helped me do this at webmasterview.com.

Now, time to open up our trusty terminal. It is possible to do this through synaptics, but its quicker to do it like this:

First thing is to install mysql for databases on our machine. Copy this bit of code into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Next we need apache2 as our webserver. Here is the code:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Then we need to get php:

sudo apt-get install php5

There are our three basic components. Now we need to hook them together:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

and

sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Now that’s just grand. We’ve now got all the elements that we need to serve files to the net. The thing is, we’re only doing this so we can work on stuff at home, in which case what we’re really looking for is an easier way to do so. What we need to do is have a public_html folder in our user directory. Perhaps now would be a good time to do that. The next step is making that work on the webserver we’ve just installed. Run this snip of code:

sudo a2enmod userdir

Then restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

You should now be able to reach your home folder via http://localhost/~yourusername/

Finally we want to be able to administer our mysql databases. Though there are many good tools for doing this I still go back to the web based phpMyAdmin. Apart from the fact that it’s highly automated (which suits me just fine) it’s also a very common program to find on your paid hosting, so would also be very familiar when you go live. For the quick and dirty way of getting it up and running, download phpMyAdmin and extract to your public_html folder. Personally I rename it to something a little easier. Then rename the file within from config.example.inc.php to config.inc.php and within that file put something in the blowfish_secret field. Then all you have to do is navigate your browser to something like http://localhost/~yourusername/phpMyAdmin

addendum

If your server is going to be visible from the big bad world and this is your everyday machine then you need to turn off that user public_html stuff (it’s insecure for general use!). To do that just enter this instruction

sudo a2dismod userdir

then reload apache as before

Just finished my final exam (computer networks) for this semester of my second year. That should mean I’m exactly half way through, not sure I am though. Unfortunately I feel that I did terribly this semester, including this exam, and I’m kinda woried that it will mean I’m going to have to add an extra semester onto my course. Still, we’ll see, I may yet be able to pull it back. Otherwise, I’m pretty glad this bit is over. The last few months have been a real struggle and I’m looking forward to coming home for an all be it brief period of time.

So now it is time to go have a few ales. I’m gonna try to hold back tonight as tomorrow is my birthday and we’re planning a raucous affair. I’m in Wales for Christmas but will be spending NYE in Thanet, most probably at the Lido, where I hope to catch up with some old friends. I’m a little sad to say this may be one of my last trips back since the family home is now up for sale with the intention of leaving the area. One can’t help but feel a little loss at the thought of not returning to an area where I spent so many of my formative years but its difficult to imagine that I would return without a family home there. I guess some people flee from the nest, others are pushed and some just have the nest taken away while they’re not looking.

Oh, what a treat… and just in time for Christmas! I am very pleased to find that the BBC has finally indulged my fetish for organic software by releasing a flash streaming version of their iPlayer.

Though of course flash isn’t homespun in itself, it is cross platform compatible and so both myself and all those other ‘nix and Mac users out there can watch the last seven days of BBC content without the need for any of that Windows tosh! Not a Vista in sight! I need never miss another episode of Cash In The Attic again. Hurrah!

Not only has Arts and Elbows not posted -in several months, but I’ve also noted that the IOTA website has been taken over by cybersquaters, with the last record I can find (thanks to the waybackmachine) is in April. Whats going on?

In a follow-up to my previous post regarding the incompatibility of the new BBC iPlayer I recently found an interview on backstage.bbc in which the developers of the iPlayer and representatives from the Open Source Consotium and the Open Rights Group discuss this very topic. It would seem that the general consensus is that release of the iPlayer to be bound to one operating system was in many ways a demonstration of the problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and thankfully just a stepping stone to more open access, initially through streaming and then hopefully to more open access.

Interestingly enough the developers pointed out that it is only a very small piece of the whole delivery system that was written in a proprietary format, namely the bit that goes on your computer. Over 90% of the system is running on Solaris with many of the developers using Debian based systems.

Ok Tony, off you go….