Fun with SWFAddress, Tweener, and animating the URL
May 5, 2008 – 11:08 pm Tags: Actionscript3, as3, bad, flash, good, SEO, SWFAddress, SWFObject, tweenerI’ve been playing around with doing some animations in the URL and also the title bar. The very awesome SWFAddress makes it quite easy to play around with.
I started out with some very simple blinking, here
and after that, moved on to some simple animation loops, here
and since that wasn’t enough, I began doing some work with Tweener in the address bar, which you can see here
after viewing a few of these you may think- hey, this is kind of cool! and it is. but if you tried using your back or forward buttons after you started one of the animations, you’ll notice that it only served to bring you back one frame! how funny!
also, if you check your browser history (and you are NOT using Safari) after starting one of the animations, you’ll see that it has been filled full of all the different frames of URL animation you saw. and with this comes some rather serious questions about how this could be used.
After registering the tweener based URL with google analytics, I was able to see this: If you tween the url, and it changes almost 100 times in an animation, the user’s browser thinks he or she has visited 100 different pages within your site. I’m not exactly sure how this might affect seach engine page-rank stuff, but I would suspect it might present a false indication to them as to how deeply a user has browsed a page. a look at this screenshot verifies that google thinks you’ve gone to different pages in a site way more times than it should.
This might be very useful to some people who want to do really annoying SEO stuff, and I really hope people would never use it for that.You could instantly, or over time, fake a user’s browser history, telling the search engines that they’ve navigated here or there without them actually having done so, in the same way in which you might animate a url. The back and forward buttons can also be rendered useless fairly easily. You could probably do some funny stuff.
But then again, I don’t know how google works, exactly, so maybe it isn’t a very big deal.
Its fun to play with.
2 Responses to “Fun with SWFAddress, Tweener, and animating the URL”
Yeah, just had to click the Back button 1473242 times to get back to you after seeing the example… But looks neet anyways.
By Chris Trynkiewicz on Aug 20, 2008
That’s cool. but first i’m trying to use swf address I’ve been posting everywhere but can’t find a way to use swf address
I’m using mx2004, so I can’t use any of the example files from http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/.
I’ve tried to use the tutorial at http://www.padizine.com/blog/swfaddress-tutorial-for-actionscript-2-0/ but can’t get it to work
Is there some compatability issue with mx 2004 and Flash 7?
This is what I’ve tried:
1. I addedto my html
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfaddress.js”
2. I added to my action script on a frame for my mc buttons
About.onRelease = function()
{
SWFAddress.setValue(”about”);
reActivateMenu();
this.gotoAndStop(3);
this.enabled = false;
gotoAndStop(”about”);
}
3. this is on every label, about contact home
SWFAddress.onChange = function()
{
var addr = SWFAddress.getValue(); //This gets the current URL, but only what was appended to http://yoursite.com/#
switch (addr)
{
case “/”:
SWFAddress.setTitle(‘My Homepage’);
//Code for navigation to homepage goes here
break;
case “/awesome”:
SWFAddress.setTitle(‘My Website – Awesome’);
//Code for navigation to awesome page code goes here
break;
//And so on
}
}
4. I think I ‘ve added the path under publish Settings > Flash > correctly should it look like this:
\Tools\AS
5. but can’t figure what to do with this:
import com.asual.swfaddress.SWFAddress;
well that’s where I am now,
What am I not doing correctly?
thank you in advance
By Dola on Mar 18, 2011