Knight New Media Center
Multimedia and Technology Training At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Multimedia and Technology Training At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Flash templates provided by Jane Stevens, Val Krist and the staff of the Ventura County Star.
Adobe Flash is a program used to display rich interactive animation and multimedia content on the Web.
One of the main advantages of Flash is that it stores all of the information in a single file that can be easily integrated with most Content Management Systems. Flash is great for showcasing various pieces of media in a dynamic way that can be completely controlled by the author. However, it should be noted that Flash is not a method to replace HTML Web pages. While Flash opens up certain capabilities, its nature of being a single locked file prevents a flash project's text from being read by some search engines, screen readers for the blind and archiving Web services that cache Web pages. Use Flash only as a way to display media in a self-contained "shell," knowing that the surrounding HTML will complement it.
This tutorial will go through the process of constructing a simple flash template with three buttons. Each button will take you to a different section of the project that will showcase your videos, photo slideshows or Google map mashup.
This is a sample of the end product this tutorial will show you how to create:
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Comments
1) Milan Andric, May 23, 2008 at 12:14 p.m. [Link]
One good example of flash development is http://www.hotstudio.com/ . One of the smartest things about this site is they have done it all in flash, but they also put the entire site in html format as well, just by using the <noscript> tag.
So a search engine sees the semantic html, which is easy to parse. You can use the unix tool lynx for example, in a terminal on a Mac, to view essentially what a spider sees.
lynx -dump http://www.hotstudio.com
If you can read that output without having a huge headache, you are probably in good shape.
If you want the nitty gritty, try
lynx -dump -source http://www.hotstudio.com
Check if the headers are in the right order with semantic html like <title>, <h2> for a header and <h3> for subheader and so on.
Great example of search engine optimization (SEO).
2) Jeremy Rue, July 1, 2008 at 3:02 p.m. [Link]
Milan, this is great information. I couldn't get Lynx to work in some situations however. The students at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism created a portal site to their multimedia projects -- done entirely in Flash.
The URL is: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spring08/
However, I warned them about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so they put things like description tags and keywords in the page meta data. The page is also XHTML compliant.
But when I use lynx -dump http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spring08/ I get nothing.
3) Milan Andric, July 1, 2008 at 3:48 p.m. [Link]
It used to work! I think the new journalism server is configured to disallow specific user agent strings. So if you specify a user agent string that cpanel accepts with lynx it will work:
lynx -useragent='Mozilla/4.0' -dump http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spring08/
And you will see that there is very little for search engines to consume. Using desription and keywords in the page <meta> tags is not as good as having a semantic html version of the content. Which is pretty easy to do in most cases.
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