web.erratica » flash + actionscript

Flash, Social Media, and the Importance of the Shared Thumbnail

robin ragle-davis — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:11:00 +0000

Poor Flash. Its gotten a bad rep over the last few years. Hailed as a fabulous tool for improving the online multimedia experience – there seem to be more reasons not to use it than reasons to use it. (The first items on my list aren’t anything new).

Flash is Bad for SEO and Accessibility)
A lot of people adopted it to give their sites “a little bit of edge and movement” but in the process hid their most important content entirely from search engines and site readers in much the same way that putting phone numbers and addresses in images completely buried their content. People have been cautioned to take their critical content out of Flash for years.

Not visible on iPhones and iPads
Apple decided not to support the technology on its products based on the fact that it is a proprietary technology. As some one who depends upon both quite a bit, I think site designers and owners should take this seriously. Imagine this scenario. A couple is searching for a home and while driving around is looking up listings using their iphone or ipad. If the local Realtor’s® website is built in Flash the listings won’t be seen. A lot of local Realtor® sites are in Flash – luckily larger companies know better.

Social Media
Today’s post was prompted by my attempt to put a facebook link to a Museum of Bird Carving in Maine. The carvings are spectacular and I wanted to share them with my friends. As you are no doubt aware facebook allows you to embed a thumbnail with your post based on the images that are coded into the page you are linking to. One is chosen automatically but you can select another if more than one exists.

The thumbnail image is really what attracts people to check out the link. Its visual.

My first attempt was to link to the home page. Unfortunately my only thumbnail choice was the image of wood shavings. I decided to select the Collection page instead. This gave me the option of selecting the image of the bird with the fish in its mouth (a vast improvement over the wood shavings) yet I was sorry that the spectacular work in the Flash banner wasn’t available.

I’m not pointing a finger as this particular website. Considering the impact on social media when creating Flash banners is a very new issue.

The lack of a compelling, or at least pertinent, image will could a direct impact on the number of clicks your shared link may receive.

It is an issue though and I’m often surprised at websites which don’t even have a logo

getting pages with flash to validate

robin ragle-davis — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 21:25:39 +0000

I spent a good portion of last week taking my own site, rrinterative.com, out of tables, creating nice tableless css and then making sure it validated. Of course you know the one about the cobblers children – I preach search friendly valid code but when it came time to put my own site up I pretty much just threw it up there nasty old tables and all.

I’m not done – a couple of pages still need work but the biggest hurdle in the process was that the validator [as you may have experienced yourself] does not like the embed tag – you know, the one Netscape based browsers, including my version of Firefox, require or Flash will not display properly.

I didn’t want to give up the Flash file, I wanted it to validate.

And so it does with a nifty conditional statement.

This is for ColdFusion but the same thing can be done in php, .NET whatever. . .

So here is my code – I’m including it all from the opening to closing object tag:

I’m sure there are better methods out there. This worked for now.

Flash Countdown Clock

robin ragle-davis — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 12:27:48 +0000

I needed to create a countdown to election day clock for a web site I oversee. After a php version proved unsatisfactory (you had to reload the page to see the change in time) I searched the web for a Flash version.

I’m sure there are others out there. I was able to find code for a clock that counted down to midnight (didn’t take into account multiple days) or one that you could generate on a website and use as an include but wasn’t self customizable for look and feel.

I finally created my own.

I am hoping this will prove useful to others. . .its a very simple design but you change the look and feel to be as loud and spectacular as you like. The important parts are the actionscript and the dynamic text fields.

The actionscript is heavily commented so you should find it easy to customize.

All I ask is that you email me [ robin@rrinteractive.com ] and let me know where you have used it. Otherwise its free.

If you find any bugs or improve upon it share with us here.

Here is the zip file: clock3fla.zip