Google now crawling Flash

From the Google blog:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

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So does this mean we will start to see a whole load of flash sites in our search results? I doubt it since even though flash sites look nice, many don’t actually have all that great textual content for the end user.

Still, good work by Google.

Firefox losing focus in text area?

Then the speed dial extension is to blame!

I don’t really want to write this because i love speed dial so much, but i have to admit that it is really starting to piss me off. Every single time i write something in a text area i lose focus.

It means that every time i am writing away, the cursor will disappear out of the text area and i am just sat there typing blankly. It seems that whenever speed dial does a refresh in the background this will happen.

The only way round it is to disable speed dial. I have contacted the developers so i hope this will be solved soon. I just wanted to post this in case anyone out there searching about the issue didn’t know how to solve it.

I lost focus 4 times whilst writing this, GRRRRR!

Did you know about Facebook Phonebook?

… ‘cuz i certainly didn’t!

Today when i logged onto Facebook i saw a little message telling me that one of my friends had changed their phone number and that it had been added to my phonebook. Phonebook you say? Call me slow but i didn’t realise that i had a phonebook on Facebook.

Not that i really understand why people post their phone number on Facebook (unless they have a VERY stringent friends-accepting policy), but it turns out that if one of your friends does then it will be automatically added to your Facebook phonebook (say that fast and drunk) in a handy dandy alphabetical list.

I didn’t realise this page existed, but then again to be honest i don’t personally find that all the settings in Facebook are where they should be. It can sometimes take me an age to tweak a setting.

Anyway you can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/mobile/?phonebook=&ref=nf and below is a screenshot…

Face book phonebook

Obviously all the phone numbers are the same and made up so weirdo’s don’t start calling them.

FitnessFirst.co.uk meet Domain Canocalization

I have decided to get off my slightly fat ass and start going to the gym, we have a fitness first which is situated right between my house and the tube station i use so there is no excuse for me not going to the gym since i will have to walk past it.

So whilst i was eating my nice healthy potato for lunch i decided to check out the fitness first website by typing in fitnessfirst.co.uk into Firefox 3’s awesomebar and hitting enter, to my surprise i got an error back saying the site could not be found. A quick edit of the URL to add www at the start then gave me access to the site.

As i stated in my other post about LondonElects not 301’ing their site, i cannot believe that a company the size of fitness first cant hirer a developer who realises this issue, i wonder how many visitors they are losing a month because people just type in the url and think the site is down.

Perhaps they will give me free membership for pointing it out? Yeah right.