Archive for November, 2006

Portable and Organized Bookmarks

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Across desktops, laptops, work computers, etc managing your bookmarks can become a pain. I used to use a Firefox plugin called “Bookmarks Synchronizer”:https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/14/ and a free FTP service. But, having to download bookmarks on startup and upload them when they change got to be to annoying.

Eventually I stopped using it and got back into disorganized and multiple computer bookmark hell. This wasn’t good so I quickly sought a solution, and started using “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ . As it is too tedious to use the web interface to add bookmarks, the “Delicious plugin”:http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension is a must have, allowing you to go to your bookmarks and create a new bookmark from buttons on Firefox.

The nice thing is that throwing a bunch of tags onto something organizes your bookmarks for you. As you type, popular suggestions and bookmarks you’ve used are displayed to avoid tagging some things “rails” and others “rubyonrails”. Another nice benefit is that the popup to bookmark something also contains a description field, making it more convenient to describe the value of the bookmark instead of only naming like you do with traditional bookmarks (not that you can’t add descriptions to them, it’s just less convenient.)

I still use Firefox’s bookmarks toolbar for frequent sites that I use access like Gmail, Rails and Ruby API’s, etc. But, which of these are used usually varies computer-to-computer because they are situational (work, personal, etc), making the need for them to be portable less. Plus, the number of these are limited so you can always add them quickly.

In any case, another great tip is to use “Firefox Live Bookmarks”:http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html to grab the feeds related to specific tags or delicious groups, and add them to your bookmarks toolbar. You could even make a “bookmarkstoolbar” tag that you subscribe to as a live bookmark, making the whole thing even more portable!

Posted in Productivity | 2 Comments »

Simple Flash SEO

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

100% Flash websites have the bad reputation of being associated with spam, not maintainable, unintuitive, and not search engine accessible. While those first few are myths to be busted elsewhere, this article will deal with the last issue.

Remember the old days of frames within sites? Now don’t try to cringe too much, but remember when not all browsers supported them? Well, there is an important parallel to draw here between framed sites and Flash sites. Both are seen as unconventional and have interesting problems dealing with information support among different mediums.

With framed sites, getting markup information to a user whose browser does not support frames is an obvious issue. The solution was the @

@ tag. In this tag, a webmaster of a framed site can include the complete or partially complete version of a site to people without frame support.</p> <p>”Yup, old news, so how does this apply to Flash?” Well, in a Flash based website you are able to get all the information to a user through the ubiquitous Flash player. Wait a second, what if the end user DOESN’T have the Flash player. Hm…now what if that end user is the Googlebot crawler? You guessed it, @<noframes>@ tag to the rescue solving essentially the same problem as described above.</p> <p>This method lets you enter info into a web page that gets indexed by Google, has fairly nice semantic meaning (noframes == noflash), and without resorting to the kind of trickery that results in being banned by Google (ie: invisible text with the same color as the background.) Better yet, it doesn’t affect your layout at all…unless of course the end user doesn’t have frames =p.</p> <p>Example:</p> <p><code><br /> <html><br /> <head></head><br /> <body><br /> <noframes>This info gets indexed by Google, even though the only thing in this web page is my Flash application!

Posted in Flash | No Comments »