July 15, 2008 at 6:54 pm · 393 views · Filed under personal
Ryan has announced a contest to investigate how Google is actually crawling swfs. He introduced the term “fleximagically searchable” to be included in external content, which is then loaded into the Flex swf. Hoping that google will read the external source file through the swf. Also testing how this shows up in the search results. Even though I think there a lot more to SEO than just letting Google crawl your site, there’s the pagerank and everything that Google uses in it’s top secret algorithm to determine search result position ranks.
Here’s the official rules:
It has to be a Flex application
“Fleximagically Searchable” must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. - But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load “Fleximagically Searchable” into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.
They seem to be a bit vague in places, but we’ll see if Ryan decides to clarify anything.
More information: I’ve found that’s helpful at Peter Elst’s post. And Ryan explains Google and Flash’s relatoinship development here. Here and here is what Google has officially said. Here is the official press release from Adobe about their new
I’ll have a couple entries I’m sure… and I’ll be sure to post about those as well.
July 14, 2008 at 8:02 pm · 960 views · Filed under tutorial
Overview:
Often I’ve had some dynamically created movieclip and then wanted to reference it in my code. This is hard to do if it is named dynamically as well, such as with an incrementing variable. If you use one (or more) variable to name an instance in runtime, you can’t always know what it will be called.
There are two ways (that I know of) to reference these clips, one is the array operator [] and the other is using the eval() function is as2 (but I’ve noticed that as3 has removed the eval function, so I’d recommend getting used to array notation).
Steps:
Create the object dynamically (or with a variable) (_root.myClip.duplicateMovieClip (”myClip”+i, i);)
Reference it with either array notation or with eval. (thisOne = _root["myClip"+i];) or (eval(”myClip” + i))
Example:
I create some movie clips dynamically using a for loop and name them all incrementally with a variable (myClip+i). But then i want to refer to some of them later, specifically. I don’t know what they are named though. They are all myClip1 myClip2 myClip3 and so on. I can use array notation to reference these (or eval). I’ve found it’s easiest to create a reference to the name once and then use it to refer to the clip I want. I imagined a scenario that when you click a mc you would want a different one to be moved. So clicking myClip3 moves myClip4 and so on. I’ve made it wrap so that 5 moves 1… They change the _y property of the next to match the one that’s clicked. Clicking the refresh button will loop through all the clips and (this time using eval) randomize the y coordinate.
this.createEmptyMovieClip("outer_mc", 1); // create a mc called outer_mc
outer_mc.createEmptyMovieClip("inner_mc", 1); // create a mc called inner_mc inside outer_mc
// 3 different ways of targeting inner_mc
trace(outer_mc.inner_mc);
trace(outer_mc["inner_mc"]);
trace(this["outer_mc"]["inner_mc"]);
// all output _level0.outer_mc.inner_mc
TheCanadian@Kirupa states it nicely: The Problem
How can I reference objects using a variable? This is commonly a problem with dynamically created buttons:
The Answer
This is probably the question that gets asked the most. Referencing an object with a variable is done using something called associative array referencing or array notation. The fundamental concept behind this is that:
Are the same thing. Associative array referencing follows the pattern of scope["prop"] where scope is the object which contains the property and prop is the name of the property you wish to reference. Save appearance, array notation works in exactly the same way as dot notation.
Going back to the original, problematic, example, the correct code would look like this:
The button string is concatenated (joined) with the i variable, forming a new reference with each iteration of the loop. First button0, then button1, et cetera.
That’s the quick, but some of you may think that that’s the same notation that is used with instances of the Array class. While that is true, the converse is actually more correct: Array instances use that notation.
Arrays are exactly the same as generic Objects, the only difference is that they have a collection of methods to deal with their properties. And because they require a need for organization, they typically only use numerical properties. Given the array myArray = ["a", "b", "c"], you could theoretically reference the indices using myArray.0, myArray.1 and myArray.2. The reason that we must use array notation is because the compiler doesn’t allow the reference of numerical properties with dot notation.
July 2, 2008 at 6:57 pm · 295 views · Filed under portfolio, work
StomperTools Plugin
StomperLabs is proud to announce another cool, FREE software tool. The StomperTools Firefox plug in! We’re going to pack many tools into this plugin in the future, but to start it off we’ve bundled two functions into this plug in.
StomperNet Ranker
The first is called StomperNet Ranker, and it allows your prospects to quickly survey the rankings for a keyword query. We built an interactive graphical representation of a search showing results from three top search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.
How to use StomperNet Ranker?
I’ll give an example… Here’s the page as it loads a search for ‘circlecube’. The green nodes represent Google results, red is Yahoo, and blue is MSN. Each result that is for an identical page is connected with a thin line, and when you hover over a node it will grow and also any nodes for identical pages. Nodes for same domain pages will grow slightly as well to give an idea of the saturation on the search results by the specific domain. Below you can see that I’m hovering over the top-left node (the screen shot helpfully removed my cursor), the title of the page is shown and you can see that the same page (my home page) ir ranked number 1 in Google and MSN (hence the line connecting them, and also they have both grown to be large nodes). Also notice that pages of the same domain (circlecube.com) are at the top 2 slots in Google, the top 3 in Yahoo, and the top 2 in MSN (the medium sized nodes). Hovering over a node displays information to the right of the node chart. Clicking on a node loads that url below the ranker ui. You can also click the Google, Yahoo, and MSN buttons above the chart to see the actual search results at each engine specifically.
Ranker had the potential to become a great comparative tool for search engine optimization and comparison.
Scrutinize This
Not only does StomperTools give you access to Ranker right in your browser, but also you can instantly “Scrutinize” any page you’re viewing right from the browser (once you have the Stomper Scrutinizer tool, so go get it too!) Use the plug in to seamlessly aim your Scrutinizer browser to whatever page you’re browsing in Firefox.
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