Zing Blog by ZingWiz

(skip to THE ANSWER if you don’t want to read the back story)

Um, so, a short post here. I kept running into this problem where a site of mine was stuck on a white page whith the little “page loading” spinner going for minutes on end and nothing happening.

That’s easy, “it’s PHP loop” you might say, but no. I talked to my web host, did a tracert request, and they said it was something to do with xo’s servers dropping pakets, but they were working to fix the problem. I smiled an nodded, and left for lunch. Came back, and things were still a no go.

Then I noticed the key to the problem. bottom of the browser was stuck “waiting for gg.google.com” after a few web searches I found my answer.

THE ANSWER

The freeze is a conflict with the web developer FireFox plugin called “Fire Bug”.  Disable the “Scripting” panel, and things should work fine.

Thanks to Brian Pedersen and his site where I found the answer: http://briancaos.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/waiting-for-gg-google-com/

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My favorite Web-related open source software packages:

1. Wordpress – easy to install, design, expand blogging platform. Everybody uses it…come on, give it a shot, you know you’ll like it.
2. Magento – A new eCommerce platfomr. A little confusing, but man, they’re are building everything you need into this puppy, and it looks great (but could use more templates)! Currently in version 1.1, but very deep. I see great things on the horizon.
3. Drupal/Joomla – both very nice Content Management Systems for creating dynamic sites. Like Wordpress, but on steroids. Both have their pluses and minuses. Drupal seems more flexible, with a more “professional” community, but Joomla has more templates and a larger community.
4. Notepad++ – I love this little text editor.
5. WinMerge – This is a file comparison tool that isn’t just for the web. I don’t use it that often, but when I do, it saves me a lot of hasstle – mainly when I’m upgrading particular eCommerce websites from one version of software to another. It allows you to compare two files, and shows you what’s differernt and what’s the same so I don’t end up overwriting the custom coding I spent hours on previously.
6. FireFox – Superior Web Browser for two reasons 1) it is more standards compliant than IE5,6,7 and 2) because of the nice web geek plugins out there like FireBug,  Web Developer Toolbar, SeoBook.com’s SEO plugin, IE Tab (eliminates need for IE!), Screengrab (for the portfolio sots), and a ton more. -  3.0 was just released like 2 weeks ago (at the time of this posting)
7. lipsum.com – This isn’t exactly open source I guess, but I thought I’d include it. I pretty much always go here to get filler text for design projects. I’ve been to a few other sites that may be better (maybe), but this one is always the one I always remember, and it’s got a text generator where you can specify how much text you want.

What are your favorites?

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I’m starting this blog with some big news from Adobe. They have announced a “team up” with search leader Google for improving the spidering of dynamic web content and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), including Flash’s .swf file format. Adobe Press Release Here. Yahoo has plans for furture support also.

This is a huge deal from an SEO and design standpoint. Flash has been conscidered “Accessible” by screen readers for some time now (starting with the release of Flash Player 6 in 2002), but the serch engines have been slow to develop a way to search and index flash content (don’t ask me why).  This is one of the major factors keeping Flash from completely taking over the web (that, and the fact that Flash is not very intuitive).

If you had a website that was 100% flash, chances are people wouldn’t be finding you through a web search. This is OK if you have the $$ to back it up with a media blitz, but terrible if you depend on organic/natural traffic.

Flash still can be a bit trickey if the whole site is in one file, because Google still doesn’t have a way to link directly to a relevent page (as far as I can tell). But if the site is HTML with Flash embeleshments, or entirely flash, but with seperate html files for each embeded page, then the results Google gives us will be more accurate.

From a fontahollic standpoint this anoncement from Adobe is cool because designers can now use flash to embed sections of accessible fancy text (like headlines,etc) that will appear the same on all computers with the Flash plugin (98% of computers on internet), and wont sacrifice their Search Engine Friendlienes (SEF).

This has been able to be done for a few years now using a sneaky, and surprisingly not very widely used method (correct me if I’m wrong) called sIFR, which uses Flash, JavaScript and CSS all mashed up together with a pinch of Oregano and a sprig of mint. Needless to say, just making a little Flash file and dropping it in will be nice.

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