A friend of mine has shown me a really neat wordpress plugin called iG:Syntax Hiliter.

For such a sofisticated plugin, I must say it was really plug and play, pretty simple. It is useful in the event that you often include snippets of code within your blog posts.

Here is an example of it in action, well actually in actionscript!

It supports about 20 other languages as well. The performance is outstanding!

( Thanks Kris! )

So I've been a beta tester for windows live messenger beta for about a month now, and I have plenty of invites to spread around.

First few comments on this post get the invites! Use your msn messenger contact as your email address so I can send the invite!

More and more people have been asking me questions about flash, and if it is SEO friendly.

Well the obvious answer is really in the question if you think about it: YES it is seo-friendly, in the sense that it does NOT harm any seo efforts on a website. However the goal of achieving a successful website in terms of seo and still use flash, well the things to consider and keep in mind are no special case for flash than it is for any other web application! CSS, your html coding, what you are doing server-side that might affect the html output, a huge list of other things as well! But in this scenario, lets stick to the topic of why flash will not harm your seo.

Google I believe currently can index a swf file, and per my tests only to a certain extent and the weight value granted to what is indexed in a swf file is no where near the importance of a standard html document. However in Flash 8 there is a whole API built that search engines will be building compatibility for. And I quote from Flash 8's feature list:

SWF Metadata
A new metadata property for the SWF file format improves searchability of SWF files by Internet search engines. Now Flash authors can add a title and description to a SWF file, allowing search engines to more accurately reflect the content represented by the SWF file.

Although this is huge advance for flash and SEO, this by no means gives flash the same SEO power as would a html document. But what is my point you may be asking?:) well! My point is (get ready for it, drum roll please?) don't put your textual content embedded into a flash movie. At least not yet anyways, we will see when this new flash 8 search engine api has been fully implemented into the major search engines. Until then, it is simple really - just continue naturally developing your web pages, web applications or whatever the case may be! That is the largest mistake any seo can make; thinking of unnatural methods in attempt to gain ranking in the search engines.

My main point here, is that flash does not under any circumstances harm your website for SEO, unless otherwise you are using flash to violate search engine guidlines (like using getURL to perform sneaky redirects for doorway pages, etc). But then again this refers to my above statement about how you should think naturally not sneakily! Don't fix something if it isnt broken, don't assume it's broken just be naturally observant.

An ideal website that uses flash and is seo-friendly, is one that has all of their textual content in html form and has all their promotional and attractive "portions" in flash, like a flash header for example!

A perfect scenario of a great time to use flash for your website is if the textual content of the website doesn't matter! Or at least does not matter to you, but then again if that is the case, then you are probably not reading this right now!

I should also mention that Google has some flash seo suggestions that I personally would only take if I were in the position that the flash website was already built. But none the less, it still helps to perform the task at hand; making flash seo-friendly.

I started in flash, that is my grounding and everything else that I have grown into came after that, even SEO. So as long as it is fact, I will be defending Flash on all acusations that flash is not seo friendly!

Lets face it, when you are forced to refer to externally loaded variables via _root, it just screams unefficiency. While I try not to be obsessive while developing anything with flash, depending on the situation many times you will find that with flash you do need to cut corners sometimes, but cutting corners does not nessecarily mean cutting efficiency.

When you use loadVariables() or loadVariablesNum() it sets whatever variables are set in the output of the URL to _root. Sure, you can specify the target movieclip or level to load these variables, but isnt that sooo flash 5 or below?

Although it is a bit late in the game to even mention the LoadVars object, I still to this day meet other flashers who still use loadVariables(). The first misconception of the LoadVars object is that it complicates things far more than what is nessecary.

Lets go over a bit as to how you can replace loadVariables() and loadVariablesNum() with the LoadVars object.

Lets take for example this line of code:

This will load whatever variables are set in the textual output of the url (example: &variable=value). Sure, you dont have to refer to _root, infact you could target a movie clip. But then a new problem presents itself: good luck detecting when its done loading! You could use onEnterFrame to check when a particular variable is set, but that is nonsense! Here i will show you how you can replace the above code with with LoadVars object.

Now thats it! I won't play the role of flash's help documentation so this is all I got for ya for now! The variables recieved back from the server is yours to do what you want with it now. I suggest using a static class to store variables that need to be multi-level, instead of using _global or _root or _parent. I'll write more about that some other time though.

And as I did mention before I am still working on a few neat WP plugins, stay tuned for that!