2 minor Flash problems, please help

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Hi,

I have a website that was created in Flash but am experiencing 2 problems that I really need help resolving. I would be EXTREMELY grateful to you or anyone who can please help or offer any advice! Here are the issues:

  1. Meta tags won’t display properly.
  2. I need to use an umlaut – ü – but the symbol messes up the Flash code for some reason.

Again, any tips or help would be very appreciated!

PS - To keep the domain name private until I get this fixed, please PM me and I will send you the link, I hope that’s okay. Thanks! :slight_smile:

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  1. Meta tags has nothing to do with flash, just edit your html file
  2. How do you mean ‘messes up the code’
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Hi EastCoast,

Let’s continue through PM if that’s okay, I just sent you a message.

PS – the Flash design at the top of your East Coast Interactive site is cool! I like the way the different projects pop out when you mouse over.

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You might be able to get more help if you post your issues/questions here rather than in private, but up to you…

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I’ve replied here as it may be useful for others. The google search result description does indeed contain a bunch of fairly random stuff it’s taken from inside your swf. Google doesn’t really bother about metatags, it’ll take content first and foremost to provide the description - and google have just upgraded their swf spidering so what you are seeing may be a result of this.

I’d provide an element of content within your embedding html (e.g the ‘about us’ content), and use swfobject to embed the swf - if the user has flash it overwrites the div containing the alternate content and displays the swf instead. As long as the content in the html is a true representation of what the swf also contains you should be good.

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Hi all, hope you had a terrific Thanksgiving… oh wait, not sure you guys are located in the states. :slight_smile: In any case, thank you very much EastCoast & Ferrari Chris, I really appreciate the help!

From the ideas you guys suggested, I thought to search my site on Bing.com and Yahoo.com and it turns out that the meta tags work correctly. It’s just Google that’s reading the meta tags wrong, which is nice to know (although I assume Google’s the major search engine most users turn to, which is why I really want to get the meta tags to display accurately).

Ferrari_Chris – As you mentioned, I signed up for Google’s Webmaster Tools and then clicked Labs > Fetch as Googlebot, and the process seemed to work. Under the “Status” column I clicked the link “Success”, which displayed the HTML source code to my site, however nothing looks off to me, so not sure how this helps or what to do next to get the meta tags working. Am I missing something?

EastCoast – Hey man, thanks for complimenting my illustrations! From the look of your site, along with your insightful post, it sounds like you have a solid understanding of code and may hopefully be able to help! Could you please explain – perhaps step-by-step as if speaking to a 3rd grader, LOL – what you mean by this paragraph?:

“…provide an element of content within your embedding html (e.g the ‘about us’ content), and use swfobject to embed the swf - if the user has flash it overwrites the div containing the alternate content and displays the swf instead. As long as the content in the html is a true representation of what the swf also contains you should be good.”

What do you mean? How do you do this?

I specialize in illustration & graphic design and am familiar with basic HTML, but when it comes to Flash programming and embedding SWF files, I’m still quite ignorant. It would be a MASSIVE help if you (or anyone) could please explain your paragraph and make it as simple as possible. I hope that’s okay because the web developer I originally worked with vanished so I’m really stuck right now.

PS – Thanks in advance for any help; this forum is fantastic, never expected such great support!

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In your ‘about us’ page in the swf you have a bunch of text that is (with regards to being relevant to search) your key content. In your embedding html you should represent this in normal fashion e.g
<div id=‘swfdiv’><h2>some title</h2><p>some information etc etc</p></div>

Then using swfobject (a javascript library to embed a swf) you target this div which gets replaced with your embedded swf if the user has flash. This has the added bonus of providing some content for viewers that don’t have flash e.g on an iphone

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EastCoast – Man, thank you SO much for suggesting SWFobject to embed my SWF file! It worked like a charm and Google’s already re-indexed my site to display the meta-tags correctly… Fantastic!

OK, final issue to fix is this:

  1. For some reason I can’t get umlauts – Ü – ü – to appear within my flash site. When I enter the ü character into my .XML file (or .TXT file, which is what the ‘ABOUT US’ section references), the umlauted character and any characters that immediately follow the ü vanish.

Someone told me that the umlauts not appearing may mean that the ü character is not embedded in Flash with the rest of the font, or it could be that the actual font does not support umlauts. What do you think? Is that why the umlauts are not displaying properly, or do you think there might be another reason? Any ideas how to fix this? Please let me know.

Thanks for this one last thing. I can’t tell you guys how much I sincerely appreciate your help! :slight_smile:

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Yes first thing is to check that the font you are using supports an umlaut character and has it embedded into the textfield. In the character embedding dialogue makes sure it’s in the file dmarked ‘include these characters’. If it’s not that then it could also be -

  • make sure the xml file encoding attribute is set to utf-8, and that it is served as utf-8 (can be checked via an http monitor such as httpfox or charles web debugging proxy)
  • Try putting System.useCodepage = true; at the start of your actionscript
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Hey EastCoast, thanks again for all your help. I inserted the code ( System.useCodepage = true; ) and the umlauts display perfectly now. Awesome!

That’s it for my questions, you’ve been a huge help man.

Take care.