Andy Li's Blog

My long awaiting birthday cake. Taste good.

I wanna blog about this because I always use Flash and building websites.

Usability, accessibility and SEO of a website are becoming a great concern these days while Flash/Flex technology is becoming a big big part of the web. Flash contents are always said to be bad for usability, accessibility and SEO, eg.not search engine friendly, can’t be easily read by other programs that even making a lot of browser functions dead, large file size… But wait, are all of these still be true NOW?

Here are some misunderstanding or not-updated thounghts on Flash content (especially Flash-only website):

Flash contents cannot be crawled and indexed by search engines

Wrong! Google has already announced that they can now index Flash contents (including those dynamic text fields!).
Ref: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

Flash-only websites make browser’s back button not usable

The back buttons (also history and bookmark) are still alive on Flash-only websites as the website use SWFAddress – using a technique called deep-linking (also can be used in AJAX).
Ref: SWFAddress official website: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/

Flash contents are having large file size

The large file size is mostly cause by embeding images or other media files, not the swf itself. If you use many images in your html site, it still needs plenty of time to load. Actually, comparing to JavaScript, the file size of the scripting part may be even smaller and load/run faster when we use AS3, since they are all complied.

Since I encountered some problems when setting up moodle 1.9.2 for my company, I googled it and found the solution. I am going to post the problem and solution hope to help someone.

I was installing moodle 1.9.2 official release built, the generic package. On windows server 2003 with php 2.5.6, mysql 5.

The problem:
I ran the installation script after I pull everything on the server. After filling in database setting and hit next, returned a blank page, no matter the database had been created manually or not.

Reason:
The installation script has bug.

Solution:
Manually create the setting file “config.php” and filled in values of database, data folder etc. as mentioned in the following site:
http://senese.wordpress.com/2007/06/07/install-moodle-18-under-apachevista/