0SEO! The Teenage Zombie Brain Sucker Topic From Hell. If you’ve talked to me before you already know that I think it’s a sham. I don’t hate it per se, but I think it’s definitely one of the most over-hyped, over-paid-attention-to subjects of the decade.
So in light of recent resurfacing of this topic (a.k.a. we have to pitch our webservices to a client tomorrow), I finally put together some of my thoughts on it in a semi-coherent way. But get this… not only will I be semi-coherent, I will even borrow a page from marketing blogs’ book of clichés. (Do blogs have books or are they books? Hm.) I give you…
Tina’s Easy 4-step Cure to the Common SEO
1. Search engines aren’t the only way you should be marketing your website
Think about it this way: how many of your friends actually became friends with you because they were a stranger randomly yelling your name from the top of mountain? Probably not too many, except for the one that is a professional yodeler. On the internet, the search engine is like the random name-yelling. “Give me a blog!” “Okay here are 21 million blogs! Hopefully one is what you want!” A better way to tell people about your site is to use business cards, word-of-mouth, trading links (LEGALLY), and even email marketing if you have to. Search really should be a last resort.
For a long time, I’ve gone away from using absolute positioning to structure my webpages and have since relied almost exclusively on floats to position things side-by-side. It seemed that absolute positioning had its disadvantages because it takes elements out of the flow of the page. So if you absolutely position a long block of text or something likewise huge, it can cover and obscure small inline things that follow it. It just makes everything a little bit crazy because suddenly things aren’t stacking up the way you expect, you get z-index issues, and IE6 explodes (IE6 explodes no matter what you do, actually.). But just now I realized one benefit of using absolute positioning over floats in some places: looking good when naked.
Here’s what I learned today: Tweens will be eaten up mid-tween by the AS3 garbage collector if it is inside a function that exits before the Tween completes. Here is a link to the lifesaving blog post about this: AS3 Tween Class Randomly Stops During Animation
Here’s also what I learned today: I’m now getting into that fun stage of learning programming where I pretty much know how to write the code to make stuff happen, but I don’t quite know all the subtleties of how the machine actually uses the code. The above was just one of many examples of this, where one minute I am chugging along confidently and the next I am utterly baffled, clueless, and like totally flipping out. They say love is a roller coaster ride. Try learning a computer language.
Yikes, it was the age-old problem of an overlapping object getting in the way of a rollover or mouseover event. Except my usual method of making the object in the way “invisible” to events via mouseEnabled = false didn’t work. Turns out the thing in the way (which was a MovieClip) had another MovieClip inside of it that was still capturing the mouse events. So note to self: always remember to set the mouseEnabled = false property on the child lowest down on the display list.
Today I find myself implementing one almost from scratch for my very first ever, all-Flash website! (Oh no, run for it.) And with it, scrollbars.
And with that, I’m discovering that scrollbars are surprisingly complex critters, made even more complex by the fact that Adobe hasn’t given us a decent scrollbar/scrolling class to work with. Which means, in the Flash world, if you want any sort of semi-awesome custom scrollbar, you pretty much have to do it from scratch or work off of other people’s preexisting examples (this is where the “almost” comes in for me).
I continue to find this a little silly because scrollbars are such a common thing and they all have the same basic functionality save for some variables that a user would want to customize. It’s, like, a prime ripe opportunity for class-ifying.
(Actually, turns out, Adobe did make this UI component scrollbar class but it only works with the weird xml layouting scheme for Flex that I know nothing about. Yikes. So what they really need to get a move on is a class that can be instantiated in AS…)
For the seasoned Googler, there are a lot of attempts, sprinkled all over the internets, by various coders of authoring a good scrollbar class. However I still find it a pain that we have to Google for it and spend all this time figuring out if any particular code we’ve found is any good before borrowing it and running with it.
To save some time later, here are a couple that I found that look pretty decent:
- http://as3.kylebrekke.com/2008/advanced-customizable-as3-scrollbar-class-for-adobe-flash-cs3/
- http://www.emstris.com/2009/01/final-scrollbar-class-v-20/
- http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=245468
The last one is the one I ran with because it was the most abstract one I found. I managed to customize it to dynamically resize to the stage height and width to accomodate liquid layouts. That was the major thing that I needed for this layout that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Also, I made the arrow buttons scroll continuously on press, rather than making the user flick repeatedly.
(That’s another thing I think Adobe seriously shouldn’t have forgotten about… why can’t we just have a continuously firing MouseEvent rather than having to tie an ENTER_FRAME to the MOUSE_DOWN?)
So it seems like there are a lot of existing classes out there, and I’m really just a small fry novice, but I wonder if I should try to find the time to write one of my own. It would be good practice, and other than iffy arithmetic (details, details…), I think I could do it pretty easily using my elementary coding skillz.
Mine at least would have the option of dynamically resizing to stage size, which I think would be really useful for some…
Anyway, back to work.
