James Oppenheim’s blog

Merry Christmas to all and a happy new year. I will be off the radar for a while so this can keep you interested. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Personal, Interesting sites, Christmas, ElfYourself

Every wondered if websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? Well the world renowned front-end developer and author Dan Cederholm answers the question on a new domain:

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

You have to love the length of the domain name!

Technorati Tags: CSS, Web Standards, Interesting Website, Dan Cederholm, Simple Bits

After needed an animated loading .gif image for a recent Ajax application I did some quick Google searching and came across a fantastic site: http://www.ajaxload.info/

Ajaxload allows you to generate your own animated Ajax loading images with a few simple click. Starting from a number of animation templates you can then choose a background and foreground colour for your new loading .gif. After 30 seconds of playing around, see some of my examples below:

Fantastic, yet simple. This is the way all websites you should be, well done Ajaxload.

Technorati Tags: Ajaxload, Ajax, Interesting websites, images, animated gif

Links, links everywhere! But where, why? Hang on, who?

Link building is an important part in any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. In an attempt to make a website seem more popular with search engine spiders it is important to gain quality inbound links to your website.

Link popularity

OK, but what is popularity? Simply put, link popularity essentially describes how popular a website is based on the number of links from other sites pointing to it. For example a site with 100 inbound links is seen to be more important than a site with 10 inbound links.

Link quality

OK so now we have quantity, what about quality? The quality of the link is much more important than the quantity of links. A few good quality links can increase your websites search engine positioning much more than a huge amount of poor quality links. A quality website will have to following attributes:

• A high Google page rank
• Search engine friendly coding with all its pages indexable
• Relevant content to your particular site
• Small number of outgoing links on the page you will be linked on
• The links on the page should be well classified and focused

Avoid artificial link farms and web rings as search engine spiders will place no importance on these types of inbound link. As a general rule, if a link is not created to be read or followed by humans, the link will be considered spam.

Where to get quality links

A great place to start gain quality and relevant inbound links are website directories. Website directories provide a topical and categorised list of links. The Strongest Links website goes one step further by creating a list of website directories ranking them on the quality of link they will provide you.

Next comes the social websites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati, MySpace and reddit which provide an easy way to create some user generated content (i.e. content generated by you, the user) with links to your website or a particular page /post on your website. These social websites generally have a lot of traffic and a high page rank which can filter through to your website with each link that you create, not to mention all the extra eyes you will have on your website.

It is a black art trying to gain quality inbound links to a website, one that I will forever be wrangling with. If you have any insights, suggestions or funny stories please let me know.

Technorati Tags: SEO, Interesting sites, link building, website directories, social websites

Directory Critic is a fantastic resource of website directories, featuring over 3900 search engine friendly website directories. Directory Critic breaks down the website directories into a number of categories, including free, paid and deep linking enabling a website owner to effectively target relevant websites when creating a link building campaign.

Website directories provide a good way to promote your website, creating exposure and traffic while building relevant inbound links. Directory Critic harnesses this power and is a must do for all good website marketing and SEO campaigns.

Technorati Tags: Directory Critic, SEO, link building

The new version of Google Analytics has launched and wow is it impressive. Showcasing an intuitive interface with drag and drop functionality, Google has taken its website statistics application to the next level. Showcasing large amounts of data in a easy to understand manner is the main advantage of Google Analytics.

Why would you bother with any other website statistics application when there is Google Analytics. Whats more, it is free!

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Analytics, website statistics, SEO

I just completed the 2007 Web Design Survey and wow was it easy. There is a distinct lack of quantitative data around about the web design industry, so if you are a web designer I encourage you to go to A List Apart and fill out the survery.

Whats more it only took me five minutes and I am in the winning for an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or a funky A List Apart T-shirt.

Come on you know you want to.

Technorati Tags: 2007 Web Design Survey, A List Apart, web, interesting sites

I have been thinking about search engines inability to crawl flash files for quite some time now, but then it struck me - use one content file to serve up both the Flash and HTML, then use JavaScript to embed the Flash. Wow, that is really quite easy.

Background

Programming an enter website in Flash is inherently hard for search engine robots to index. This is because all the website content is sitting inside a complied SWF file. This technique has disappeared to the backs of our minds (much like the 80’s) and has turned into an SEO no no. However, there is some light at the end of the tunnel because Google can actually read a flash file. But this technique is not foolproof - mainly because it is very hard to understand structure, context and semantics when reading a linear Flash file as a set of static HTML pages.

Take the following example : ‘Index Index action 92 anatomy 6 Arm band 127 Around the world 62′ - does not really make any sense to me.

Example

Here is an example of search engine friendly flash programming. Wow that is amazing I hear you exclaim, well I will tell you how I did it.

Solution

First of all there needs to be one main content file. The reason for this is that you don’t want to have to update both the Flash and HTML if there is a change to the content or you need to add an extra page. I did this with a PHP array, setting up each page (you could do it with any other server side scripting language):

//setup the pages array
$pages = Array();

//add each page to the main pages array
$page = Array();
$page['navTitle'] = 'home';
$page['img'] = '_img/home.jpg';
$page['content'] = "home content goes here";
$pages[] = $page;

$page = Array();
$page['navTitle'] = 'about';
$page['img'] = '_img/about.jpg';
$page['content'] = "about content goes here";
$pages[] = $page;

//ect...

Then next trick is to use JavaScript to embed the Flash into the HTML page. The reason JavaScript is used to embed Flash is because search engine spiders to not read JavaScript at all. This quirk enables only visual browsers (i.e. people using a web browser) to see the Flash, which is inevitably what we want. Now there are a number of ways to embed Flash using JavaScript, the SWFObject seems to be the popular choice at the moment. However, I recently read about Robert Nyman solution, which looks very promising and at a small 2.1KB, who could you go wrong.

Once we have both the content and the Flash setup, we need to build the website. The first step is to make a normal HTML website using the before mentioned PHP array. Then essentially you do the exact same thing in Flash, however, instead of using PHP you use ActionScript:

//load the nav from the PHP array
loadNavTitle = new LoadVars();
loadNavTitle.load('path to echoed out php file');
loadNavTitle.onLoad = function (success) {


if (success) {
navTitle = loadNavTitle.result;
navArray = navTitle.split('|'); //split up the echoed data into an array
buildNav(); //function to build the nav
}

}

function buildNav(){
for (i=0; i
//spawn clips
root.attachMovie('navObject', 'nav_mc'+i, _root.getNextHighestDepth());


//set instance names
var nav_mc:Object = _root['nav_mc'+i];


//setup an id
nav_mc.id = i;


//add the text
nav_mc.nav_title.text = navArray[i];


//on release
nav_mc.onRelease = function(){
getContent(this.id);
}

I have left out some steps, namely to PHP file to import the Flash data and the main HTML index page, but the essential structure is there.

Done and done!

Conclusion

So there you have it, a fully featured, animated website that is search engine friendly. And with no ajax! Who would have thought.

Technorati Tags: SEO, flash, JavaScript, web

This morning I went hot air ballooning over Melbourne. Wow, what an amazing experience! We flew with a company called Balloon Sunrise, I can’t speak highly enough of them - very professional, safe, efficient and funny. Whats more there was a glass of champaign with our 5 star buffet breakfast at the Grand Hyatt to finish off, how could it get any better.

Hot air ballooning was an inspiring experience, silently floating over Melbourne’s CBD enabled us to gain a birds eye view of some of Melbourne’s most famous landmarks - Port Phillip Bay, The Arts Centre, MCG and the Bolte Bridge. I was even considering become a hot air balloon pilot, although I think that whim was more full of hot air than anything else!?!

Hot air ballooning at sunrise provided some fantastic photo opportunities. I will upload them to my Flickr page, so watch out for some hot air.

Technorati Tags: hot air ballooning, Melbourne, Australia, Balloon Sunrise

Where can I get the cheapest royalty free stock photos on the internet I here you say.

Fotolia.com provide royalty free stock photos at extremely reduced prices - $1 for medium, $2 for large and $3 for extra large. After you come too from the shock of those crazy low prices, you will ask, well why are they so cheap? Well according to Fotolia it “is the first worldwide social marketplace for royalty free stock images, allowing individuals and professionals to legally buy and share stock images and illustrations”.

With the medium images being about 2MB in size they are easily big enough for use on the web.

That being said some of the images can be quite cheesy, but if you do some intense searching I am sure you will be able to find something useful and all for a measly $1, a US dollar that is.

So go forth and prosper, tell your friends and family the more the merrier.

Technorati Tags: stock photos, photography, cheap photos, free photos, web