flex3 deep linking

[gowerthegroap]

I just wondered if anyone could help me out.

I have made an attempt at creating a flex blog. The whole purpose of the project was for me to get involved with flex and to create something that didn't have the words press or word associated with it.

I also integrated swfAddress for which I thought would help out with deep linking, back/forward button utilisation, and search rankings. However here is my problem...

Now for the main articles on the homepage, I have a tilelist which when clicked changes the view state to "news" and the url to /News/pagetitleX. Clicking the back button will indeed return you to the homepage. However, if you copy the url /News/pagetitleX and try to go direct to it, the page is blank and displays no data, as it has no data preselected to display.

I noticed Group94, (a flash site using what I can only assume is swfAddress) have loads of pages ranking on google in the same way I want mine to rank. But how have they done this?


group94 (http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site:+++site:www.group94.com+group94.com)

I have no idea how I can tie my pages to populate data as per the url. At the moment they only do this via manually selecting a tile from the tilelist.

Thanks in advance for A: anyone following me, B: any help

Gower

[Sekhar]

You can do this with a server side script. E.g., I did it with Python on Google App Engine. The basic process is:

Browser asks for http://foo.com/abc/def
Server script sees /abc/def and builds a page with the SWF and text content for /abc/def (I put this under noscript), setting the "/abc/def" path in a cookie
Both browser and Google see the same page - browser loads the SWF, Google sees the noscript and indexes
Server script passes the SWF back to the browser and using the cookie text changes URL to http://foo.com/#/abc/def
Flash in the browser detects "/abc/def" in the URL and goes to the appropriate page

I didn't use SWFAddress, but I suspect the process on the client side is similar.

E.g., load http://www.allurefx.com/Marketing-today/Presence. The URL will change to http://www.allurefx.com/#/Marketing-today/Presence and you will go to the corresponding page. Also see the source, you will find the text under noscript.