[thelist] Using Flash on a website

[John Dowdell]

> I just built a dual boot laptop to take on a trip.  In spite of the fact that I installed it,
> Flash player, it is not displaying so I need to figure out what I did

Hard for us out here to help... we don't even know OS or browser! (We do know, however, that literally millions of people successfully install every single day.) Here's a quick troubleshooting guide:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2010/02/troubleshooting_player_stabili.html

> Part of the problem you encounter with flash sites is one of additional maintenance, the other big part is SEO. 

Not really. That's been a popular theme among the snake-oil experts, but static text within SWF has been spidered for about a decade, and a few years ago dynamic text was also indexed. Doesn't really help you in the morass that is today's search landscape, however. 

jd


________________________________________
From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org [thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Bob Meetin [bobm at dottedi.biz]
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 11:42 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] Using Flash on a website

On 03/23/2011 12:12 AM, Steven Streight wrote:

> I agree that all Flash websites are horrible usability in most cases that
> I've seen.
>
> But Flash is useful for video like YouTube. If your iPhone doesn't render
> Flash objects, you're severely restricted in viewing videos.
>
I do UNIX/Linux not because I am systems administration type but because I really love working on the command line, ftp, vi, etc. Someone mentioned earlier of occasional problems getting flash to work on alternate OS.  I just built a dual boot laptop to take on a trip.  In spite of the fact that I installed it, Flash player, it is not displaying so I need to figure out what I did on my desktop 2+ years back to make it work.

When it works it's great. I use it exclusively for videos, no flash sites.  For one of my clients I licensed a commercial player with an administrative control panel to handle playlists, HD FLV Player for Joomla. It is genuinely wonderful, worth the bucks.  For video conversion I use command line mencoder or ffmpeg.

Part of the problem you encounter with flash sites is one of additional maintenance, the other big part is SEO. Joel I did hear you but I doubt it's that simple or perhaps you have some alternate text functionality? Still, text is text.  Ma & Pa shop clients with small budgets see the stuff and make assumptions that it's simple simple.  Usability is never their concern.  Make me a site like this one, ... . Discussions become longer, etc.  Now make it work on my iPod, whatever.  Now put me at the top of the search engines.  More discussion, etc... MS just came out with a new browser, why doesn't my website display correctly?

Yadda yadda education yadda.  Here comes the splitting headache.  Simple is good!

-Bob

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