Desktop Takeover - April fools joke using Flash

This is a little trick I've pulled on some family members in the past and most recently on my boss for April Fools. All you need for this is a working version of Adobe Flash.

If you cant see whats happening, basically the effect is that the desktop looks like its moving back and forth.

So all I am doing here is tweening 2 instances of the desktop (which i Print Screened) over a static instance. Then all you do is full screen the SWF on your targets desktop. You can do a lot with this little gag including; hiding the users mouse, popping up text and moving icons at will.

Back when GMail did their YouTube contest, i used this gag to simulate the envelope moving across multiple screens.

A few things to remember when doing this are:
Make sure your stage width and height are the same as the target monitor
I use PNG's of the desktop so there is no quality loss
Make sure you do View -> Full Screen and not just maximize the SWF

* Update: Here are the source files of an example

Anatomy of a Blog - Scripting for Social Media

There's a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part....

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I'm assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You've got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um... not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I'll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the 'rel-tag'. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page's header. Now when you're displaying 'rel-tag' that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a 'tag'.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/tags/great+blog rel='tag'>great blog</a>

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I've separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/cross_media_is_now_our_life' rel='bookmark'>Cross Media is now our life!</a>

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel="alternate" and type="application/rss+xml" to define a META link to an RSS file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MagiBlog - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magiblog" />

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I've showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.

Realistic Fog/Smoke Effect

Here's another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.


View: http://bishport.com/fog.html

Source: zip

Realistic Flame Effect

This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.


View: http://bishport.com/flame3.html

Source: zip

Your Company on Google Maps

Google Maps is one of the most widely used online direction services on the web. That being said, have you checked your company's listing on Google maps recently. In Google Maps' Local Business Center you can manage your company's address, services, image and much more. It also boosted my company's site up on the local listings. It did take 2 weeks to verify the changes but it was definitely worth it.

Google Docs for Desktop

So while wandering around the Print OnDemand Expo in Boston I bumped into a small Google booth. So in conversation I was told that Google will be releasing a desktop version of Google Documents and Spreadsheets. Furthermore, they said you can expect to see a new link showing up on your Gmail page...
I was told it will be something similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Where was this information 6 months ago when my company chose Basecamp over Google Apps. Although, i do love my Basecamp.

In other news from OnDemand 08, some cool stuff is going on in the world of variable data publishing. Lots of cool web-to-print apps as well as InDesign plugins. Its also cool to see an array of PURL solutions on the market, however I am still not impressed. Every solution I've seen is limited in one way or another; bad reporting, limited functionality, no security, etc.

However, overall it was a good time.

Personalized Landing Pages 2.0

So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where's the next step up?

Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people's names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn't in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and I was amazed at what they had done. Here is a PURL someone made for me. I like everything about it, from the page looking like a blog to my name being inserted into the movie.

Now here's something my own company put together. Basically I wanted the user to be able to interact with the flash movie in real time from outside of the movie itself via the web-form. Using javascript, I was able to insert the users name into the newspaper at runtime and its had an amazing response. People need a break from their every day activities and these fun side trackers give them this opportunity, so both the user and the company win.

So I'll say it now and say it loud. Get Interactive, Engage your Audience and become successful.

SEO and Flash

Can search engines read flash? A lot of people think that because flash is a program running on a website, it cannot be read by search engines. This is true to some extant however that does not mean there aren't methods to make your flash movies Search Engine friendly. In fact Google CAN index your flash movies. In "Google Can Now Index . . . Flash!An Interview with Michael Marshall by Robin Nobles" (here), they discuss how Google indexes your flash movie and different things the author can do to help the process.

There are also other methods you can use if you want to be sure all search engines are indexing your flash movie. I use SWFobject. Here's a brief explanation of how it can be used with some examples.

So first thing you need to do is upload swfobject.js to your website and link it in your header somewhere:

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

Then you need to create a div tag with all the default contents of the flash movie. What your going to do is over right all of the data inside of that div tag when you load your flash movie.

<div id="flashcontent">
This is what the search engines will read
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
var so = new SWFObject("mymovie.swf", "sotester", "600", "400", "9", "#FFFFFF");
so.write("flashcontent");
// ]]>
</script>

View Live Tutorial

And your done! So here's the result:


And here's what you see if you don't have javascript or Flash Player:


And here's what the search engines see:

Not too shabby.

The cool thing about all of this is the code is valid HTML and XHTML 1.0. There are also a bunch of other cool features with swfobject so explore their website and have some fun.

Now there has been some discussion on whether or not the content in the div tag that is being overwritten might be looked at as spam by Google at some point. So far it hasn't been a problem and as long as developers don't abuse this we should be good well into the future.

So go off and have fun with flash. Make many websites and flash intros to your hearts content (if your into that sorta thing). The future of flash looks brighter every day.

PHPwcms

So I've been working with an awesome CMS called PHPwcms. Its been in rolling development now for a couple years however its excellent to work with from a programmers standpoint. Ive modded it a couple times to suit my needs based on the client. For instance there was one scenario where i had to make a custom search that displayed files and web pages alike (http://www.gwg.org). For my own company's website i used a blog developed by Shinypixel and modded it to incorporate tags and a sidebar navigation.

So basically, like the site says, its an awesome framework for any site needing content management. The back end handles files very well and there is alot of room for modding in any which direction. So far i have three sites using it, all with different mods built into it and using it in a different way. Check out phpwcms here:


and the sites I've made with it here:
gwg.org
magicomm.biz
joninessex.com

SEO for the Non-Techies

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Any true SEO expert will tell you there is a lot more that goes into it including but not limited to incoming link monitoring and maintenance, following Google’s new search engine patents, optimizing for keywords, etc.

So there are 3 main things to remember when optimizing your website:
1) Choose appropriate keywords:
This includes making sure you have those keywords in 3 different places; your site content, your Meta content, and your incoming links. Also don’t use your keywords too much, this is known as "stuffing", but too little and Google won’t index your site properly.

2) Friendly URLs:
The following is BAD:
mysite.com/index.php?car=jeep&type=wrangler
This is GOOD:
mysite.com/jeep/wrangler
The difference is easy to see, one is easier to read for both humans and search engines. Also it is a good thing to be specific, so use your keywords in your URL where you can.
To accomplish this most people use Mod-Rewrite (Google it). Another alternative is to use a Content Management System for your website that will automatically create friendly URLs for you. I use PHPwcms but other good ones are Drupal and Mambo but I found mine at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/.

3) QUALITY incoming links to your site
This is the most important in my opinion and usually the hardest to pull off.
Basically the idea is Google will boost your site up on the rankings if you have alot of incoming links from sites similar to yours. This does not include link compilation sites and Google might penalize you for this. Usually the best thing to do is contact the administrators of similar sites and request an affiliate link in exchange for a service or a back link. Another good strategy is to put out press releases with your sites link in it.

Extras:
So if you can’t tell, Google is the most popular search engine out there getting roughly 91 million searches per day. That’s a little less than half of all searches done daily. So it’s usually best practice to optimize your site for Google. If you want more information just contact me through facebook and I can give you some extra pointers.