Aug

5

Search Engine Optimization for Flex

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essentially a marketing strategy where the goal is to improve your site’s traffic volume
as well as the quality of that traffic. SEO can be a key requirement for some projects to be deemed successful, especially
for contentbased sites. The RMX, being one such site, has a lot of content, some of which is in formats that are easily accessible
to search engines—our blogs, forums, and RSS feeds. But we also have event calendars, job postings, and videos that are exposed
through rich Flex interfaces. These elements are not as accessible as plain HTML, but we want to ensure that the various search
engines can easily find them too, and that’s where SEO fits in.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_17
  • Authors
    • Chris Charlton

Aug

5

Building the Event Calendar

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

In this chapter, I’ll cover dating (Web 2.0 style), the RMX event calendar, and backend integration.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_14
  • Authors
    • Hasan Otuome

Aug

5

Building the Blog

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

The purpose of the RMX is not just to provide aggregated content, but also to build a diverse online social network. You need
to ensure that you provide your members with the right content creation and distribution tools, designed in the right ways
for their needs and enjoyment to allow the network to grow. In this chapter and the chapters that follow, you’ll see the four
ways we allow RMX members to network and communicate with each other, starting with blogs.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_12
  • Authors
    • Hasan Otuome

Aug

5

Ideas for the Future: Extending the RMX

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

In this book, we describe a lot of what has gone into version 1 of the RMX. In this chapter, I want to outline just a few
of the ideas that we’d like to pursue after launch to provide some insight into our longer-term vision for the application
and the direction in which it is headed, and to perhaps give you some ideas about features you’d like to build into your own
Flex applications. I’ve broken these features into five different buckets: data, advertising, money, UG-specific features,
and distribution options.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_15
  • Authors
    • R. Blank

Aug

5

Defining the Application: introducing the RMX

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

Social networking is the driving factor behind much investment and development in Web 2.0 applications. In the minds of many,
Web 2.0 community is synonymous with MySpace or YouTube. But those are examples of communities emerging around the technologies:
MySpace virtually owns generic social networking, and YouTube virtually owns generic video sharing. And that’s how the Internet
basically works for these types of businesses. You’ve heard it a million times before—there’s only one Amazon, one eBay, one
del.icio.us, one Blogger, and so forth. These are examples of companies having developed Internet-based communities basically
from scratch, out of whole-cloth, fueled by innovative and well-timed use of unique technology. And they have each come to
dominate their respective markets to the point where the #2 player in each space is not even playing the same game.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_2
  • Authors
    • R. Blank

Aug

5

Advertising and Flex

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

Advertising is a vital aspect of many Internet-based projects, and the RMX is no different. In this chapter, I will discuss
some of the options available for banner and instream (or video) advertising, explain the problems with using most mainstream
solutions inside of Flash-based applications, and show how we solved these issues for our project—utilizing open source technologies.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_11
  • Authors
    • R. Blank

Aug

5

Collecting and Working with Aggregated Content

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

Most RIAs are complex—sometimes really complex. And in the context of a social media network, the ways in which you utilize
content are a vital aspect of your application. The ability to generate, store, and access a wide variety of content types,
from a large number of users, across a wide variety of platforms, is a requirement of any application in this space. As we
all know, content is data, and managing that data properly is a fundamental requirement of any well-engineered application.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_6
  • Authors
    • Chris Charlton

Aug

5

Planning the Application: Building the RMX

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

In this chapter, I describe the processing of planning development of the Rich Media Exchange. The goal here is twofold: first,
to explore the process used for planning projects on the scope of the RMX, and then to explore some of the specific considerations
we encountered in planning the RMX.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_3
  • Authors
    • R. Blank

Aug

5

Introduction to Flex 2 Applications

August 5, 2008 | Comments Off

What an amazingly exciting time for Flash! Flash technologies are now way more powerful than ever, and with Flex you now have
a whole new way of creating content for the Flash Platform. To get you started on the road to excellence in Flex applications,
this chapter gives you some background on the current state of the industry, what people are doing with Flash, and what Flex
is adding to the mix.

  • Content Type Book Chapter
  • DOI 10.1007/978-1-4302-0442-8_1
  • Authors
    • R. Blank