Here’s a pretty good article about Flash and Google.

How to Design Flash Pages for Google

This is where I found out about the Flash SDK.

If you are at all concerned about how search engines might index your Flash site/files then you must get the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK. It’s a comand line utility so warm up that DOS prompt but it isn’t too hard to use. Best of all you’ll be able to look at your site/files through the eyes of a search engine spider.

I discovered that my SciFi test site returns a big fat zero to a spider. The reason is that all the data in the site is loaded via XML files. That really sucks. It means that - at least for now - dynmamic data doesn’t count. So not only is it hard as hell to make a Flash website that is spider friendly now we need to find a work-around for dynamic data. That really kind of sucks.

Hey Adobe. Why haven’t you produced any hardware? Everyone else is doing it. (I’m sure Google is thinking about it.)

Here’s my wish: Adobe produces a sleek little handheld that runs off a Linux core. For the most part it’s just a music/video player. But of course the greatness of this little device would be that the GUI is all Flash/Flex. And that’s a good name for it to: The Device.

So, Adobe, the key here is that you publish the API that talks to all the hardware and let us Flash Freaks mash it up into the greatest little device on the planet. Who knows what hundreds of thousands of designers/developers could come up with. One second it’s a phone and the next it’s a tri-corder.

Tell you what, you guys start thinking about it and let me know where to send my $500. I’ll buy one right now and you send it to me when you get it built. I’m not joking.

The Flash platform has come a long way. But there is one big hurdle left: better integration with search engines. That’s something that Flash and AJAX both have with.

I created a test site to see how a spider might index a Flash based website. There isn’t much to on the site. Just some reviews of SciFi movies and such. But the site is bookmarkable. So far it hasn’t been crawled or if it has it doesn’t return anything at Google. When I do a site search it doesn’t bring back any results.

If you check it out you can see that it is about as simple as any Flash site could be. Everything is text, including the links. No MovieClips to confuse things. So I’d consider this a best case scenario for indexing - if it would just get crawled.

If you feel like burying a link on your site to the SciFi.VectorSpaceStudios.com site then please do so. Maybe getting a few more links out there to it would help.

Of course anything that I discover I’ll report here. My dream is that it will get indexed by Google and I’ll be able to click a link there that will take me into the site to the content that I searched for. If that happens I’ll make the FLA for the site available so others can follow suit. I’d love to see people out there developing sites in Flash that are indexed and bookmarkable. That would help Flash clear it’s last major hurdle - until we find something else. :-)

Flash Forward 2006 is over. What a show. I’d have to say that “Let’s Get Physical: Extending the Flash Platform” by Craig Swann was the most sock removing session. I’m very tempted to give Craig the best speaker award to but he got inched out by John Davey who was a bloody riot.

The award for sexiest speaker was also a tight race between John Davey and Laura Arguello. In the end it was Laura’s sexy accent that won it for her. (John, you have a lovely accent to.) All kidding aside: Laura and Nahuel Foronda gave a great presentation but it is hard as hell to concentrate on server side programming when a very good looking woman, with a <Spanish?> accent is talking about anything tech. I once fell in love with a beautiful Russian woman who was reading a Javascript book. Sadly the love affair lasted only a few minutes until her boyfriend showed up.

Cool things that I found out:

1. Flex is going to change the world.
2. Adobe is planning to use the beautiful interface that they implemented in AE7 across the entire CS suite. That will, probably, eventually, include Flash.
3. If there is one program out there that I should have learned years ago but didn’t it’s After Effects. Frak me that is an amazing tool. I could have a blast spending the next few years turning all their cool text effects into AS classes.
4. The Flash 9 player will run 1000% - yes One Thousand percent - faster than the 8 player. That’s mostly because of improvements to Actionscript 3.
5. Did I mention that Flex rocks?

I already accosted Lynda - of Lynda.com - about being a speaker at the Austin Flash Forward in September. I have ideas for an intro to OOP session that would rock the house. I’ll probably write more about that later.

Oh, and by the way, during the conference I was consumed with writing some seriously wicked code that billions of Flash developers around the world will want to use. I finally got it to work and man is it cool. Coming soon to a blog near you.

I have to run. The library’s closing so it’s time for me to go make my my car ready for sleeply time.