Now with the ever growing demand for richer environment Intel is introducing a concept of meeting online in a 3D environment.
The ScienceSim will give users the capability to build their own virtual worlds. The possibilities are endless.

ScienceSim provides the basic building blocks (client viewers, installation utilities, management tools, etc.), and new technologies that enable broader interoperability through content sharing. Interested people can quickly bring up their own worlds on their own systems and experiment with creating 3D worlds of their own.” What’s interesting about this project is the amount of open source used and yet the compatibility with Second Life.

Lets begin by defining some standard references that will come in-play later on:

Test Sandbox links: PayPal Schema, eBL [Ebay Business Language] Base Components and Component Types

Production links: PayPal Schema,  eBL Base Components and Component Types

1. Set up of a sandbox account that would allow you to play with your virtual development shopping cart.
2. Go look at the development center for the PayPal SDK

Developers such as my self who are boggled by Flash capabilities and at the same time annoyed by the disadvantages of setting up a highly functional webpage only to face the inevitability of fighting browsers and client settings were forced to find other means of providing the infamous crawlers with the content that could not be retrieved from the compiled Flash executable. 

Here are some facts that one might find interesting:

1.       The new improvement can be applied to every version of the SWF format.  [Both old and new].

2.       Developers do not need to modify their existent project to make the content more searchable, the information will be available at the get go.

3.       Google has already began the rollout process of the new searchable SWF capability.

4.       At the moment the searching capabilities only affects the text base interior of the SWF file.  Currently there is no logic that focuses on the graphical [images] aspect of the infrastructure. 

Overall the new changes spell faster, better search results when it comes to working with flash.  The long despised draw back can finally be forgotten and a new age of vibrant high dimensional applications is waiting to make their mark on the web.

www.two-become-one.org: Soon to be fully up and running a new wedding planner website is in the process of being created.

1. Create a javascript function that is initiated when the page is loaded ‘onload’ event.
2. Create a tag with a particular id somewhere on your page [lets say "fuzzy_object" for a sake of an argument].
3. In your javascript function create a  single string containing the specifications of your object [in my case it was an swf file].
4. Perform the following: document.getElementById(‘fuzzy_object’).innerHTML = concatinated_string.

This is a tad generic but it should work.   If not just let me know and I’ll post a more detailed solution.

The information in the database was stored in Cyrillic format, hence when ever I was loading the data in to the SWF compiled file the end result was a collection of garbage data.  Setting the actuall HTML to Windows-1251 encoding did not help the situation.

My following approach was to locate a native functionality within the Flex architecture to mediate the situation.  Unforchunately I wasn’t successful in aquiring sattisfying examples to solve the problem.  For that matter it became sadly obvious that I haven’t seen any flash pages using non/english alphabet [either I haven't been checking international sites that much or Adobe Flex isn't widely used overseas] .

My third approach was to look at the actual php code that was generating the XML structure.  I’ve discovered a useful function mb_convert_encoding that eventually solved my problems.  Using a simple snippet of code:

mb_convert_encoding($string_to_convert,'UTF-8','Windows-1251');

I was able to convert the data from UTF-8 in to Windows-1251 which allowed me to display the desired Cyrillic characters.

Having been developing in Adobe Flex for the past while I’ve been ignoring the CSS issue but in my latest project I had to face the beast. My goal was to find a way in which I can block particular tags in both IE and in Firefox. so here’s what I found after doing some research.

For a page where you have an internal <div id=”pathway_text_inner”> the following will be ignored in Firefox:

#pathway_text_inner{ 
_width: 900px;
_padding-left: 10px;
_padding-top: 7px;
}

Pretty much anything that is preceded by an underscore is ignored in Firefox.

Similarly the following is ignored in IE7.

*:lang(en) #pathway_text_inner{ 
padding-left: 10px;
padding-top: 10px;
height: 20px;
overflow: hidden;
width: 890px;
}

where <body lang=”en”> .

I know there’s been quite a bit written about the subject but I couldn’t find the exact answer from the first Google search that I performed. Hence this post.

Cheers.

Sadly I had to respond that ‘No, not really’. Neadless to say, eager to learn more about the subject and knowing that soon in the near future I would have to look in to the subject my self I started Googling.

Without long I came across two interesting articles, ‘A modern approach to Flash SEO‘ – related to designing website in Flash and dealing with the known problem that Google might/might-not parse .swf files when crawling through web pages. A second article dealt with an example of how when developing a website the QA rarely takes in to account the prespective of a search engine web-crawler to which I suggest examining the ‘SEO Tools – Spider Simulator‘ article.

Thats it for now, stay tuned for more info.