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“Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life, but even the patience of the brothers was being tested by our slow Internet.”

FATHER DANIEL VAN SANTVOORT, Cistercian monk, on his Welsh island community’s decision to get broadband. Source

I’ve written several times about the need to have an efficient website, which can run fast enough for everyone to use. However, I guess some people didn’t get the message, and have caused the Monks to run out of patience.

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In the past, the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, et all) couldn’t really search Flash files that well. Well Adobe has been working with the search engines to allow them to search the Flash sites, widgets, buttons, and more.

This is good news on the surface, but still requires one digging a little deeper before trying to get a nifty Flash site. Here are three quick take aways to know about, before

The first thing to know, is you still have to use text, as text, to be searchable. Many Flash developers convert the text into something known as shapes so that they can manipulate it easier to look nice on your screen. While your site will look nicer overall, it will cause the search engine to fail to read that part of you Flash site.

Second, most search engines cannot run JavaScript. Because of a software patent issue, Internet Explorer needs JavaScript to write the Flash file to the webpage. So now, in many cases, your Flash site is no longer searchable.

Flash screens, are not the same as web pages, and that means it will be harder to isolate a topic and rank for it, when looking at the overall site with all of the other text working along with it. Add upon that, that most Flash developers are inexperienced at Search Engine Optimization, and lack good tools to build a search optimized site (links, individual pages, helpful page elements, etc) they will most likely not be able to help you rank like a good HTML based website could.

Overall, I would hold off on developing your all Flash based sites if you are interested in long term Search Engine rankings. (Besides, most developers charge more for Flash sites - use that money to make more content which can rank in the search engines, it will be money better spent.)

SEOmoz has more information on his views on why Flash and Search Engines still don’t mix.

Web Worker Daily recently brought up how some local Internet providers are looking to meter users bandwidth. What this basically means is that you are (usually) given a base amount of data you can transfer per month, then for each additional unit, usually gigabytes, they charge you an additional fee.

If you have a website, you are probably aware of this yourself. You can have so much traffic, and additional traffic creates an additional charge. We’ve discussed in the past how you will want to be careful of your site design as it will affect your charges.

Now, you need an efficient site because not only will it cost you more if you don’t, but it will cost your customers more. And they will not like that. If they start telling their friends it will generate the type of publicity you don’t need.

So make your site fast, cheap to host, and cheap to view.

Image via WikipediaAs a college instructor, I always am interested in two things;

1. learning about how other’s have taught, and
2. what should I tell my students if I only had one last class.

Randy Pausch delivered the “Last Lecture” after he learned that he’d developed terminal pancreatic cancer.

I was able to take away some good teaching tips as he discussed his career, but I was also able to learn more about life.

Prof. Pausch passed away on Friday. If you’ve not had a chance to view the video of his last lecture, or read the book (which is like a longer version of the lecture), I’d recommend that you do so. Fulfill your dreams by living right, and help other’s full fill their dreams.

Below is the video from YouTube. I’d recommend it.