As you might’ve noticed I haven’t been keeping up with writing here. Partially that was because I was doing an internship and was working on a different subject. But during that internship at least I was working on multimedia. At this moment however I’ve started a new course in business administration.
So for the next […]

Connectholland, the company I’ve worked at for 1,5 years is hiring. They have a total of 4 job openings, 1 for a senior developer, 1 junior developer, 1 management assistant and one project manager. Connectholland is based in Rotterdam.
I would encourage everyone who feels they fit into one of those profiles to look at the […]

I’m in the process of getting my bachelor degree and part of that was writing a paper about a self selected subject.

How to optimize a (Flash) website for search engines

Any comments on this paper are appreciated.

CSS Reboot 2006 is a website that promotes websites that did a complete redesign on may 1 first, and adhere to stadards. Everyone that did a redesign could sign up and post before and after screenshots of their website. Which gives a brilliant overview of about 750 newly designed websites.
So, what is hip in […]

Flash movies play because of a plugin in the browser. This plugin automatigically start up the program/player that is needed to see the content. There are different plugins for quicktime, applets, flash and others. A really nifty invention one might think.
The question is however, whose invention was it? In ninties of the last century a […]

Marko Dugonjić wrote an article about an image preloader, which is too good not to mention.
The idea is brilliantly easy. So easy the real question would be “why didn’t anyone think of this before?”. A pre-loader is frequently used with flashmovies, to indicate that they are, indeed, loading. They get these pre-loaders as they tend […]

Dustin came up with the idea to have the first annual naked day. A day on which your site shows off all it’s white spots. So, no stylesheets for 24 hours. The reason behind this is to see how userfriendly your site is to people without css, and that includes (to an extent) screenreaders.
For […]

Since 20 March the new beta for Flex 2.0 is available from labs.macromedia.com.
One of the things that is possible in Flex is giving defining how far from the next object your ‘box’ is.
This was the code in Flex 2.0 beta 1.

<Canvas>
<Button label=”hello, world” />
<layoutConstraints>
[…]

This topic is quite old already. Every ‘important’ webdeveloper says to follow standards and don’t use tables for layout as there is CSS. But still, almost all beginners still start at tables. Easy to learn, fast to builld why go to CSS?
Search engines
You want visitors on your site, don’t you? Well, search engines don’t […]

Flex is a development framework by Adobe and is meant to help developers make applications. That means, no timeline, no graphics, no animations. After making a flex application the source will be compiled into a .swf file, which can be put online and viewed just like regular .swf’s.
Framework
Flex is a framework, and as such offers […]

You can find an essay on this site about the effect that firefox has on the open source community. And one of the interesting points that is mentioned in that, is the 2 page advertisment in the new york times last year. To my surprise I found a similar advertisement in the Dutch Spits today […]

In december of 2005 Google did a major test on over a billion sites to check which elements are used most. The results are quite interesting.
Tables
It is interesting to see how often ‘table’ is used. In fact, it is the 9th most used element on the web. And, on those table elements (including td […]

A continuation of the last post.
Heuristics are rules of thumb to check wether something is usable. The rules I explain here are written by Jacob Nielsen.
Recognition rather than recall
The short term memory of the average can have 7 items in it. So, if your menu has 10 different buttons, chances are they’ll not […]

Wikipedia:
Heuristic is the art and science of discovery and invention. The word comes from the same Greek root as “eureka”: εὑρισκω, which means “I find”. A heuristic is a way of directing your attention fruitfully. The term was introduced by Pappus of Alexandria in the 4th century.
Heuristics are more known as a ‘rule of thumb’. […]

A favicon is a small icon that can be shown in the address bar, or in the list of favorites. This image is generally a small visual clue as to which site it belongs to. For this site it is the star symbol which is also used for links and posts.
A favicon is an […]

In maths there where 3 axis which coordinates together point to a certain position. The x-axis, in css seen as left, the y-axis, top in css, and the z-axis, which would be the z-index in css. With the transparent png support of ie7, it will be much more common to position elements on top of […]

XHTML can do everything HTML can, so the real question is, do you need any of functions XHTML offers. And, will you be able to use the proper mimetype for it? Without the correct mimetype there is no reason to use XHTML as it will trigger quirks mode in the browser. And that is something […]

Unfortunately, too many webdevelopers are still not familiar with the concept of URL rewriting. And many that did come in touch with Apache’s mod_rewrite, often do not use many of its powerful features, or even put it aside completely because of its relatively high complexity
While the learning curve of URL rewriting might be steep, especially […]

Internet Explorer has been a pain to work with for webdevelopers who use CSS. The last new version emerged over 5 years ago, and although some bugs have been fixed, the major rise of css hasn’t been supported by it. Now however, IE7 is on the way. Which is a good, and a bad thing.
The […]

In CSS a lot is based around the box model, but what is that, and how does it work?
A box or a block?
In the css specs of the W3C they mention the box model, which also applies to block elements. However, they also apply to for example tables, and even to the body element. An […]

When writing for the web start with the most important conclusion, then work down to the facts that lead you to that conclusion. That is a nutshell how you write for the web.
This is because people read differently when they visit a website. Most of the time your visitors will be looking for some […]

As developers gradually start to get used to using css based layouts instead of tables there is a new pitfill waiting around the corner, the use of semantically incorrect code. There isn’t much you can’t do with div and span, add a <a> element you’re almost at the end of the small list of elements […]

On my last blogpost I got this comment:
John Dowdell Says:
January 20th, 2006 at 2:12
For what it’s worth, Google has been databasing the text within SWFs for quite some time… try search term “filetype:swf contrary evidence” to test. (This was the purpose of the Flash Search Engine SDK release a few years ago.)
But aqs always, good […]

I recently got a question in my e-mail on how to do seo with flash. Maybe something with xml? Would that be indexed better? And, won’t it be seen as spam?
Well, this guy is definately thinking in the right direction, xml is the way to go.
Use RSS for indexing
Instead of using just ‘a’ xml […]

There are enough different ways to define font-size in css, but what do they all mean, and when to use them? Three are variable sizes, depending on their surroundings to figure out what size they’re shown at. Those are the em, ex and px. The rest are absolute heights, for when you really need to […]

In the Netherlands we have a store called Hema. This store has a specific format they always use in their folders and commercials. And mainly includes big pictures with text over it and lots of white. When I find one of their folders on the doormat I’ll connect it with Hema instantly. Without even seeing […]

Rounding error example
This example from positioniseverything.net shows perfectly when you should not use percentages specifying width and height. If you look at that page, and resize your window missing pixels will appear. The theory behind this is simpel.
When you have 101 pixels and devide that in four even blocks (25%) all of those will […]

You know all about childs electors, pseudo classes and pseudo elements. But is that all CSS you need to know? Not with CSS 3 coming. The W3C has put out a working draft for CSS 3 selectors on the 15th of December. But what’s in it?
Do remember that there is only a working draft right […]

When I started working at connectholland I made a great form, which would change the colours of the fields that were incorrectly ordered. But only after you pressed the ’send’ button. The next website had a form that checked with javascript before even sending the information.
Nowadays however that’s just not good enough. But how […]

Building your first website is very easy when you use a WYSIWYG. But is it still feasable to use such a program when building more complicated sites or should you switch to hand coding?

A lot of good stuff can be done with CSS 2 (w3c recommendation 1998), but unfortunately a lot of it is still badly supported. However, with the new browsers (firefox, IE7 soon) a lot more of CSS 2 will be implemented. One of the cool things you can use is the attribute selector.
Suppose you have […]

With css you get the ability to style your lists better than you could before. And example of that would be the dropdown menu’s that can be made with css (usually done with lists), but most people forget about the use of different styles for lists items.
Traditionally used is the disc, a small black circle.
However […]

Images with a rollover effect are easy to make with the use of javascripts onRollOver function. However, it doesn’t work with javascript disabled. Luckily this is also possible with CSS.
My favorite way to do this works with an image that contains both the rollover and the normal state of the image, thus making it […]

1. More classes
So you’ve mastered classes? But did you know you can use more than one class per element?
<p class=’first big’>text</p>
This way, the CSS rules for both ‘first’ and ‘big will apply to this paragraph. If any rules overlap the one that’s closests to the bottom in the css will prevail.
2. Descendant selector
HTML is […]

A happy new year to everyone and the best of wishes.
Sonja

Prefetching is a technique used by Firefox and Mozilla to fetch a page before the link is actually clicked. It uses the idle time of the browser to get the contents you would probably want to see next. How does it work, and why would you want to use it?
How it works is quite simple, […]

If you’ve ever read Nielsens top ten webdesign mistakes you’ll know that one of the mistakes that comes back year after year is not differing between visited and not visited links. The question generally is how to do this without breaking the design.
Designing a different mark-up for the current active link, and giving visited […]

What is web 2.0? Is it just a buzz-word used to sell, or is it a technology?
Web 2.0 got it’s name from the web 2.0 conference and at first meant nothing. Now however web 2.0 points to a number of vague things like ajax, and democracy, and user based content. Web 2.0 means nothing. […]

After the succes of Adobe/Macromedia’s dreamweaver, illustrator, photoshop, fireworks and flash Microsoft decided they should not be left behind. So Microsoft is coming with the expression family. The expression family consists of 3 products, the graphic designer, the interactive designer and the webdesigner.
Expressions Acrylic graphic designer
This one seems most like a combination of photoshop and […]

It seems that a lot more emphasis is put on search engine optimalization (seo) the few months than it has before. Today I’ve been explaining to a client how he needs to write his text in order to be found easier on search engines. So let’s write a small post about seo.
Flash
One of the things […]

HTML validation This amazing firefox extension by Marc Gueury shows you, at the bottom of each page how many errors and warnings there are in that page. It does this without sending the html of to w3c or another validator, but uses tTidy the embedded validator of Firefox originally made by the w3c.
As this […]

I’ve been working on some flash stuff lately, building a semi 3d world through which one can roam somewhat freely. However I found some weird behaviour in Flash. Apparently, new means second hand.
The as class
class Line {
var values_arr = new Array();
function Line() {
}
function setArrayValue(i:Number):Void {
[…]