Comments on: Flash, SWFAddress and Google analytics

By: Jloa

Jloa — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:18:55 +0000

Greets, guys.
I’ve just finished my new open source lib called SWFSize and wanted to share it with you, cause it really help A LOT.
In short: SWFSize is a small (really small) library for Adobe Flash technology that works in collaboration with SWFObject and provides control over the swf’s container metrics. By controlling the swf’s container metrics SWFSize gives you the ability to solve the MAC OS mouse wheel issue once and for all; don’t use workarounds – use the browser’s native scrollbars instead.
You can view the samples/get source/docs at the project’s home page.

Project home: http://chargedweb.com/swfsize/

It has already saved me time during my last two projects.
Hope it saves yours.
Cheers.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:34:06 +0000

@Chris: Thanks. SWFAddress doesn’t really help to get the site indexed, but it does help to make the website search engine friendly. We can redirect search engine driven visits to domain.com/news/hello to the Flash version at domain.com/#/news/hello for Flash enabled browsers.

Creating a Flash website that is completely transparent to search engines is hugely important and should be recommended to clients as standard now.

By: chris

chris — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 20:10:03 +0000

Matt:
Hi, I’ve been through your redman design site, it looks great. I just wondered if you can explain how swfAddress is allowing dynamic xml to be indexed. I see that appears in the search results also – are you doing something clever for this? Or is google just taking its snippets from your xml?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:46:41 +0000

Jason: Yes you are right about Google indexing SWFs but that’s not really the point. Most content Flash sites are database driven so we can deliver the content as HTML and XML to be displayed within Flash.

Check out this site that we created that is fully indexed by Google et al:
http://www.redman-design.com

Try searching for ‘john rylands library design’.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 20:41:35 +0000

I’m using SWFAddress for the first time and wondering if there’s any additional coding needed in order for google analytics to record hits. I’ve added the GA javascript from google to the page holding my flash document. Is that all I need to do? Is the rest really automatic as Antti says?

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:37:05 +0000

A search friendly flash site?

I know Google says their ‘indexing’ Flash now, but that claim is questionable at best – not to mention the fact that other workarounds are far from elegant

By: Luís Neng

Luís Neng — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:37:59 +0000

Hi Bruce, thanks for your comment.
I double checked the GA Reports and only some of the page titles get mess up. What version of IE you are using?
I’m using IE7 and the weird URL thingy doesn’t exists…
Might be a browser version issue?

I also used your approach on other projects (but without SWFAddress): http://www.ibsbookmastertrends.com

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:17:27 +0000

So I ended up commenting out the call to urchinTracker in swfaddress.js:
/*urchinTracker(_2e);*/

and just calling GA from ActionScript whenever a new section is displayed:
if ( ExternalInterface.available )
{
ExternalInterface.call( “urchinTracker”, “/” + sectionId );
}

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 04:32:56 +0000

Yea this is cool. A couple of things I’ve noticed though.

1 – In IE the page reports a wierdly formated page title to GA.

For example, enter this url into IE:
http://www.spirituc.com/#/pt/grupo/servicos/

The servicos page displays ant the title bar of the browser reads: Spirituc – Servicos

All good, the problem is that the page title that gets reported to GA is “Spirituc#/pt/grupo/servicos/” it’s not a big deal but it messes up the page title reports in GA.

2 – Navigating to a page of your site using the back or forward button does not cause a page view to be reported to GA.

In general the systems awesome. These are not major issues but if anyone has solutions I would be most appreciative.

Thanks!

By: Markus

Markus — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:03:55 +0000

It is good! Yeeeeees… It is goood!