Emak Mafu Labs Blog

So I tried to install Silverlight today, just out of curiosity, just to see how rubbish it was and what a pain it would be to install. And surprise surprise:

I’d give up now if I were you….

Its the day after the night before… we’ve had 11 emails each, totaling a massive 55 - constantly informing us of this amazing event to grace the Imperial College Union in South Ken, so we thought we’d check out the hype. I’ll leave my video to explain why we ended up 3 pints down with a fish ‘n chips chaser in the local boozer….

In the video you see two queues funneling into a bottle neck entrance - these people have supposedly registered to, ’skip the queues!’, as one of the many emails cheerfully proposed. Upon asking a fellow queue buddy how long he had been wasting his life here for - he replied, we a monotone drone, “1 hour”, and he wasn’t even at the front!

for this, Emak Mafu left for a better life in the pub

(Apologies for the ’special’ guy staring at the camera at the beginning - we hope it didn’t scare anyones children )

We have installed a Flex Wiki (Flexipedia) so please share what you can on there. Currently it is pretty empty (in fact, it’s completely empty) but we will try and get as much on there as soon as we can.

We have now set up the London Flex User Group, check out the site promise we’ll change the look of it so it isn’t like this one! If you are in London and using flex please register on the site.

Roll up, roll up, last chance to pre-register for Adobe Max in Barcelona! It’s free and means 15% off the final cost, although we’re still not sure how much it will be. All we do know is that it’ll be a Flex fest, and all the big guns from Adobe will be there.

Sorry this is a bit late getting on here, it was recorded almost 2 months ago but i think it is still valid. I hope we can get James over to the UK to talk at some point, he has some really nice stuff to show. You can find his blog here. More proof for my theory that Flex will take off with the help of the Java, not the Flash community.

I hope this post makes it to the first page of Google, because I’m getting a bit tierd checking there for some inspiration, or a new tool to help with this problem that plagues our image as Flash Developers, ‘Cool site, but bad SEO’.

Its time to provide a solution…. Emak Mafu has taken it upon our sly selves to solve this worldwide problem once and for all - Mafugle! Its as powerful as its Celtic sounding name and bites as hard as the dog it could be named after!

Our Goal is to provide a simple extra process to the Roll-Out’ phase of a Flash site, by Mafugling it (in place anywhere on the web), all the nessesary Xhtml files will be created per section, including all the links and images the flash site benefits from, so even Google images will have a chance to spy your images and add them to the very popular images.google.com. These files will appear next to your .swf, and some cunning code will be put into your index file directing all the searchbots to the SEO files, instead of tying to figure out the contents of the .swf.

How this will work:
The only purpose of the .SWF is to provide a nice way of displaying the data in the database. Its like CSS for xHtml. So following the rules of W3c, splitting design and structure is already done for us. So all that is left is to point all the necessary parts of an html page, like the title, body, images etc to the correct database entry, and wola! Its that simple - then throw in a Flex application to house such a process which will make the whole process as un-techy as your Gran, then badabing! - oh, did i mention that all the SEo file will actually be dynamic, so change anything in the database, all of your SEO files will mimic this information, so its a kin of, apply once, and reep the rewards kind of application.

Check back in the next few week, an alpha should already be installed on a clients website, i’ll let you guys know how it goes, and maybe give an estimate for when you can get your hands on it

So we have been using Media Temple for a while now, and I have noticed the service get worse and worse. We have had a kernel panic and a DOS attack in the space on 4 months, which is not good news. We are ready to jump ship soon, hopefully to Rackspace. We have been dealing with them for one client, and they seem to be rock solid, and based in the UK. Has anyone else go Media Temple woes? Please let us know…

I’m not sure how this one slipped throught the net, we might try and go, but it’s a bit last minute. Hackday seems to be a great idea, a gathering of minds to talk about mashups etc. You can see more about the event here.

So the FOWA has been announced for October 3rd - 5th. And it’s only a fiver!!!
I really hope it’s not going to be a Rails Fest…and what’s the deal with the wordpress website?