I’ve just gotta say that I love google’s services!  Their getting a little to big for me……  Rather they long ago got to big!  Without trying to sound like an alarmist or anything: they have a TON of power over the internet!  They have as much power over the internet as microsoft has over the computers.

But I digress……  I do love their calendar and analytics web apps!  The analytics app I use to monitor how  site content on English Bay.com is doing and what problems there may be.  It gives amazing stats!  Things I have never had before like the stat on connection  speeds of our site visitors.  Our average visitor has a cable internet connection, and only 2% use dial up.  Thats useful information for me as the webmaster of this site.

There google calendar application is another great example of a highly useful web app.  I use it at the LGTB Centre where I volunteer and here on English Bay.com.  On this site it is great for showing events in this area.  Also there are a number of other public calendars you can subscribe to and show in your own calendar.  I have done that on the English Bay.com calendar and now there is a TON more listings there.  Everything from Canadian holidays, the weather, music and comedy listings, all kinds of stuff….  Check it out: English Bay.com Community Calendar

If you have any community listings for our calendar please email them to me.  We will lists any public event in the Vancouver area, big events to garage sales, it’s all fair game.

The index page for English Bay is now the flashy FLASH page……  It always was the version of English Bay.com that I wanted people to see. Simply put is is more flashy and interesting than static HTML pages.  

The FLASH version is 8 and the size is only 800kb.  For a flash page that is almost nothing!  So I hope no one is having any troubles with loading the page or excessive load times.  Some people do not have flash enabled browsers and or may experience other issues…. So there is also a link at the very top of the page that leads to the regular HTML version.  Also there are lots of site links at the bottom of the page that lead to several areas of the site.  Please email me if you are having troubles navigating the site!!!  

So check out the new index page! English Bay.com

Just a quick note to let blog readers know that I have done some updates to the FLASH version of the site. You can view them here: English Bay FLASH Site

I love the flash version of our site!  I wish that flash were more indexable by search engines and that I could rely on all people having computers updated to see flash pages.  Then I would only have the flash version and would not continue to have both HTML & FLASH.  

It is true that the overwhelming majority of computers can read flash pages.  You may have noticed a lot more adds on sites these days are flash adds not gif’s or other types of images like in days gone bye.  Flash is more lively and well….  More flashy.  It makes for pages that are more fun to view and more interesting to interact with.  So if I had my way English Bay.com would have only a Flash version of the site. But believe it or not: Some people are still on dial up and some computers are not updated to read flash.

Another big thing to consider in having only a flash site is that search engines like Google have a hard time with flash sites.  They see one large movie, not a site with individual pages. Mostly because it is in fact an interactive movie without typical pages.  This means that individual page content inside flash site is not seen or indexed by the search engines and so page ranking and indexing suffer.  

Anyway….  These are just some random thoughts on flash and an update to let you know I’ve updated the flash version of our site.