FC Redesign
The Flapping Crane redesign is underway.
The widescreen skits won’t be as large as I’d wanted. They’ll be 427×240. Not huge, but better than how it is now.
It appears that the video player is going to be the biggest headache. The quicktime plugin’s javascript interface has been pissing me off. And IE, as always, sucks.
I am pretty severely separating content, structure, style and behavior. Which just makes more obvious a problem we have — 99% of our content is video and audio, so it’s not exactly geared towards search engines like Google. This might be mitigated by a nicer “News” section, which may or may not happen, but it’s still a concern.
Another related problem is balancing client-side DOM manipulation and server-provided structure and content. On one hand, the only people who can really view our content have quicktime installed. So we can assume that they have a somewhat modern browser with javascript. On the other hand, how do I provide google with something to work with without being sneaky? That is, google probably doesn’t look too kindly on content which is in the HTML but hidden from typical browsers (display:none, etc.).
The best solution I’ve come up with is to have a link on the page to “Past Skits” (which we were going to have anyway) which has all the skits hard-coded. That page can have all those links for google, but formatted nicely for browsers. The front page, however, will be Javascript and XMLHttpRequest madness.
In fact, everything will likely be handled through XMLHttpRequest with a non-javascript fallback. Links will still work, but bookmarking will be problematic. YUI has a beta browser history manager, but I’m not sure if I’ll work it into the site this time around.
One YUI annoyance — it’s a lot of javascript. A lot. Even moving the js to the end of the html is only partly effective — events that fire on YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady still are quite delayed. On the upside, once the page loads, it won’t be reloaded as the user looks at different videos and sections.
A PHP 5 annoyance — as far as I know, there is no way to generate a self-closing <link> tag using DOMDocument. So to validate, I had to change the DOCTYPE to HTML 4.01 Strict. Ultimately inconsequential, but nevertheless lame. This may be a problem with the particular version of PHP 5 I’m using; I don’t know.
Anyway, the site will look quite different. I’m sure everyone will hate it for a while.
August 10th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Perhaps you could create a taxonomy for your videos that is listed near it. The more adjectives you come up with the better for google.
Also, have you looked at google sitemaps. You can send an xml file to google and it will index your entire site without you having to worry about the robots trying to follow your links.
August 11th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Yeah, both those ideas are pretty good.
I’ve got a rudimentary sort of tagging system in place to identify who is in what skits (see the about page). I might try extending that to keywords associated with skits.
There really will be two phases to this — the happy dynamic interface and the plain html interface. They aren’t really separate, they’ll just have to be fleshed out at different times.