Fleximagically.com is an experiment in Flash player Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ). Adobe, Google, and Yahoo recently announced that they now have the capability to index dynamic content inside Flash based websites.

Fleximagically’s experiment is to take a Wordpress blog and create a Flash front end for the user to see. The backend is still the same Wordpress Admin/Dashboard that any other blogger might see.

Even though it’s Flash the browser’s history buttons ( back/forward ) still work. As does deepLinking directly to a post. In fact, unless your right-click on the page you’re likely to not notice that you’re on a website that is all Flash - actually, it’s built with Adobe Flex.

And trackbacks work as well. Here’s a link to a post about the semantic markup that the Flash player can render.

You might have noticed that my WordPress theme is my own creation. Or, to be more precise, it’s a vastly edited version of another theme.

I browsed around for a while and tried out about 6-8 different themes. I finally found one that I liked pretty well that had the general layout and components that I wanted. Then I thought to myself, “Self, you’re a web designer/coder. You know plenty of CSS. Just edit this one into something you really like.”

About 10 hours of work later I had something that was roughly viewable. Then, I viewed the page in IE. WTF? I remember the day what the crappyest code would work just fine in IE. I’m not really sure why everything falls apart in IE now but works just fine in FF. I had to bend a few rules here and there to get things to work which unfortunately produces about 25 htmlTidy warnings. Someday when I’m bored maybe I’ll work to clean that up. For now it works.

IE has two main issues with this site. First it doesn’t render PNGs correctly. Second, it’s not getting the CSS right because the entire 3rd column is missing.

The theme that I was working from had an amazingly complex CSS page. I’ve never really used the cascade part of CSS that much. When I have a font that I want to look a certain way I style it just that way with CSS. I usually don’t bother with inheriting styles from the parent container too much aside from styling the and

tags just in case I forgot to add a specific style to some text. The CSS that I started with for this site was cascading from all over the place. Sometimes it would take 5 minutes of searching, editing, refreshing just to change the color of a specific piece of text somewhere.

If you’re stupid enough - like me - to lose your Wordpress admin login then here are the step-by-step instructions to go into phpMyAdmin and regain access to your admin privileges.

My friend Collis Ta’eed of FlashDen.net, and many other sites, is organizing an event to help promote environmental awareness. The goal is to get as many people as possible to blog about a single event on the same day.

On October 15th - Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.

In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.

You can read more about it on the official site.

I’m at my wits end trying to keep spam-bots off my blog. I’ve tried renaming key PHP files as these guys suggest to see if that helps.

By the way, all spammers are invited to go hiking with me in the Grand Canyon anytime. Just say the word and I’m there.

I can never remember this but the syntax for using FlashVars with the Kimili Wordpress plugin is:

fvars="name1=value1; name2=value2; nameN=valueN"

I learned a few things while using the websiteGrader service.

1. Chances are 92 out-of 100 that Ryan Stewart’s DigitalBackcountry blog has a better grade than your blog. Trust me on this.

2. Search engines see your website at www.yourwebsite.com as a different website than yourwebsite.com. And that’s not a good thing.

To fix issue number one you’ll just have to write about 25 posts per day, every day, for the rest of your life.

To fix issue number two you’ll just need to add two lines of code to your htaccess file.

Here’s what you do: In your htaccess file - located in the root of your server - add the following two lines of code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^youwebsite.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

What that does is take any attempts to visit www.yoursite.com and send them to yoursite.com.

Here’s my htaccess file that fixes the problem as an example.
[kml_flashembed movie=”/flash/displayCode_short.swf” width=”500″ height=”100″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF” fvars=”path=/flash/143_htaccess.txt” wmode=”normal” /]

I’m not sure what this might do to sub domains if you have them. I did test and make sure that links such as: www.polygeek.com/videomaru/ still sent browsers to polygeek.com/videomaru/ and that seemed to work fine.

Note to Ryan: you beat me by one percentage point this time. But you just wait. You, just, wait!

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search made a joint announcement that they are going to all support sitemaps .90 - official site.

And what does that mean?

from AjaxWorld:

How Sitemaps Work
A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

This all sounds like good news, especially for Flash and Ajax developers who have had issues getting their dynamic sites accurately crawled.

What I’d like to know is what safeguards there are to prevent abuse. Guess we’ll find out.

I was really getting annoyed with comment spam here on my blog. I’m using Wordpress so I got Akismet installed. That certainly helped. So far it’s caught over 20,000 comment spams. But a few were still getting through.

So, as a next level of protection I got Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin. It’s been running for about a week now and so far I haven’t gotten any spam.

f you’re using Wordpress I’d highly recommend it.

According to Google/Analytics stats on the visitors to polyGeek.com 54% are using a version of Firefox vs 34% using IE. No surprise there considering that I write about Adobe Flash. I’m not making a judgment call. I’m only saying that technical people are more likely to use Firefox than grandma’s. Or should I say non-technical grandma’s?

Worldwide Firefox market share hovers around 14-16%. Internet Explorer gets around 78% market share. I’m extrapolating from an article published in February ‘07: Internet Explorer loses ground to Firefox, Safari in US; holds its ground worldwide.
Here is the surprising thing I find about the browser stats here at polyGeek: about 81% of them are using Firefox 2.0 verses about 12% using Firefox 1.5. That’s a pretty good upgrade percentage. On the other hand IE users are much more evenly split between 52% still using the old 6.0 version and 47% using the latest 7.0 version.

Note that both Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0 were released on virtually the same date. (October 18, 2006 for IE and 6 days later for Firefox on October 24, 2006)

I suppose that Firefox users are typically interested in using the latest and greatest while IE users upgrade only when they have to.