Happy Birthday America!

• Posted by Brent on July 3, 2008 22:20
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Happy Birthday America! I've been all around the world and there is no doubt in my mind that we live in the greatest country history has ever known. We enjoy a lifestyle better than any other nation. Even those considered to be poor here live better than most people in the world. Our nation is mighty and good. Never listen to those who trash America and try to make you believe that we are an evil, selfish nation. We spread freedom throughout the world, spilling blood not only for our own freedom, but for others  as well.

The freedom we enjoy today is thanks to the men and women of our military - the finest fighting force on earth. Men and women in our military sacrifice their time, limbs, and lives so that we can live free.  Thank you to all of you who protect our freedom! I've had the honor of defending our great nation as a US Marine myself, and I can honestly say its the thing I'm most proud of in my life. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Have a Happy Independence Day everyone!

Google Is Indexing Flash Links

• Posted by Brent on July 3, 2008 01:55
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Search Engine War published a post today outlining a test they conducted to see if Googlebot is really following URL's embedded in SWF files. It looks like they are! They are crawling links in SWF files placed on a page with embed tags, and with SWFObject. They are even crawling links in hidden layers.

 Search Engine War also coined the term "flash bombing".  Basically they are saying it may be possible to embed tons of links in a flash file to get them crawled by Google. Sneaky! Search Engine War is planning further testing of Google's ability to crawl and index SWF file content and links.

Visual Studio and .NET Hot Fixes

• Posted by Brent on July 2, 2008 00:43
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Microsoft has moved all Visual Studio and .NET hot fixes to a single location on MSDN Code Gallery.  Here is a link that pulls up all the hot fixes:

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Hotfix

 They used to be over at the Connect site but you had to log in, and they were somewhat hard to find. Now you can get them all from the link above without being logged in.

Google Improves Flash Indexing !

• Posted by Brent on July 1, 2008 00:13
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I'm a recent newcomer to Adobe Flex development so when I read yesterday that Google has improved it's ability to crawl SWF files of all kinds, it put a  on my face.  Google can now index the textual content in flash files of all kinds. They can also crawl URLs embedded in Flash files as well!  How do they do it? Google says:

"We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library."

Even better is the fact that Flex/Flash devs don't need to do anything special with their SWF files. Just keep on developing as usual!

According to Google, there are 3 limitation to crawling the text in your SWF files:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files

You can read more about this here here here and here .