OK, i admit it. I’m probably the only person bothered by this. In the age of broadband where mobile phones browse the web at high speed, I’m probably a dinosaur for trying to keep movie file sizes down. But still. There still are people out there who browse the web at 56 kilobits per second, waiting for minutes while a web page full of graphics is transferred to their computer by two analog modems shouting bits at each other.

That’s one reason why I decided to see if re-writing my WP-Cumulus Flash movie in Actionscript 3 would yield a smaller file. Unfortunately, the outcome was not all I had hoped it to be.
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I’ve just uploaded a new version of WP-Cumulus. Version 1.03 attemps to fix compatibility issues, adds a widget, speed control and several other little things. See here for the changelog.

Update
With the help of Mujahid (and several others), I’ve been able to track down the cause of the “it kills my blog” error. I turns out I was closing PHP’s output buffer once too often, which PHP version 5.2 and newer does not like very much. All should be well for these users with version 1.04. Can’t tell you how relieved I am.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my WP-Cumulus WordPress plugin. Many people have asked my whether they can use the Flash movie in their own projects, and how to go about it. Well, here’s how.
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I love tags. I think it’s a brilliant idea to tag blog post. Not so much because I feel it enables people to find information they’re looking for, but because tag clouds usually offer a more adventurous mode of navigation. If I click on a tag called “water” there’s no way of telling whether I’m going to end up reading about water shortages in the third world or the chemical composition of rain. And I like surprises.

What I do not like however, is the way tag clouds traditionally look. Enlarging the font for often-used tags causes all sorts of line height weirdness, which bugs me. This why I started experimenting with Flash to see if I could come up with something better looking. I’m so happy with the initial results I decided to post them here. Both the movie and the plugin itself need loads of work, but please feel free to tell me how you like it so far.

P.S. The tag cloud displayed by the movie is this site’s actual ‘live’ tag cloud, and yes, if you manage to click a tag the page for that tag will open…

P.P.S. You can download the plugin here.

As of now, ‘m testing a new WordPress theme on this site. I haven’t decided on a title yet, and there’s tons of little stuff missing, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be releasing this one sometime this or next month. The most important thing to sort out is decent widget support. This was sorely lacking from some of my earlier themes, and instead of updating them I decided to dedicate the time to designing a new one altogether.

I wanted to use a white background to increase readability, and I’m using Flash movies to do some typography tricks that plain HTML doesn’t know yet. Other than that it’s a relatively simple theme that will be easy to modify by anyone who isn’t completely allergic to style sheets or HTML.

So, what do you think?

We’re now three days into my little experiment, and it seem the three most important search engines have found the page I created. Here are the results I’ve been able to gather so far…

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Triggered by a comment on my recent Flash SEO post I decided to set up my own experiment to find out if, and to what extent search engines index Flash content.
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Ever since I released my Tranquility and Tranquility White WordPress themes, I’ve been getting emails about the Flash file used in both themes. People like to customize their theme, and the supplied swf file is locked. This was done on purpose, as I consider it to be a finished piece of Flash art. I originally created it for my daughter Ruby when she was born, and I feel it should not be messed with.

However, keeping source code to yourself is not a very open source minded thing to do and I’ve learned a lot from looking at other people’s code. Which is why I decided to post the original fla file. Please be gentle with it.

Flower fla file

In my daytime job I’m a Flash developer. But when it comes to creating websites I don’t think Flash is the way to go. Not just because Flash has some serious accessibility issues, but mainly because Flash-only websites are very search engine unfriendly. They usually consist of only one HTML page, and most of those contain no readable content. So Google, MSN and Yahoo will have no clue as to what your site’s about. I’ve been pondering things you could do to fix or at least improve this. I’ve played around with a few of these ideas and techniques, others are still on my to-try list. Please let me know if you’ve come up with other solutions or have anything else to add.
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