Archive for the ‘HTML/JavaScript’ Category

Sharing your content with Facebook

Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Facebook provides a really easy way to get your content into a Facebook user's Mini-Feed. Basically you use a link to Facebook's share partner page and provide as a url param a link to your content. When a Facebook user click's the link provided by you, Facebook scrapes the HTML of the page provided in the link and creates the content for a Mini-Feed line item or a message to send to another Facebook user.

The downside of this is that the user can change the title and message body, pick between 0-3 auto picked images and comment on it. This leaves a lot of room for a negative impact on your content, but even with this possibility a lot of the brands that I work with are doing it. The key to making this work is to create specialized HTML pages that have only the content you want to share.

To see this in action and share this blog, click on the Facebook Share badge.
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Check out Facebook's Share Partners page for the code. And be sure to click on the "How do I make sure the Share Preview works?" link at the bottom of the page to see how to structure the HTML for your content page.

SWFAddress helps make Flash applications
Search Engine compatible

Friday, July 20th, 2007
Flash has always suffered from being a black box to search engines. Even if SWFs were readable by search engines it wouldn’t help because any respectable RIA these days gets its content related data elsewhere. At the very minimum the content is stored in XML file(s) that don’t follow any kind of standard or in a database, both of which lock away your content from search engines. And if that weren’t enough, most Flash applications only have one HTML page and that doesn’t exactly increase your chances of a good ranking, no matter how good your alternate content and meta tags are.

Thankfully there are things like SWFAddress that can really make a difference in the SEO battle. SWFAddress allows you to have independent urls and titles for every page in your Flash site along with providing a mechanism for deep linking. Downloading SWFAddress gets you AS classes for all three flavors, the SWFAddress JavaScript file and a variety of excellent examples.

Combine this with the Sitemap Protocol and now we’re cooking with fire!