Rob Larsen

Archive for the 'google' Category

rel="canonical?" I'm Down. More Importantly, So Are Yahoo! and Google

In the middle of moving all those underscore delineated URLs to dash delineated URLs*, Google went ahead and announced the rel="canonical" scheme for defining the preferred URL for a piece of content. While it's not the biggest deal for me, other than the "/" vs "/index.php" question, for many people with more dynamic systems it's a big deal. Bravo to everyone involved as it's a really straightforward, easy-to-implement solution to a common, troublesome problem.
(more…)

What The Google Malware Bug and the Ma.gnolia.com Meltdown Tell Me About Building Web Sites

It's not easy to do this stuff right.

Actually, I already knew that, but these two events definitely give me higher profile (and in the case of Ma.gnolia, more horrifying) anecdotes to share when I stare incredulously at someone who's just proposed, with a dismissive wave of their hand (indicating it'll be easy), adding in some feature or running fast and loose with site or feature development on a project. While I do play pretty loose with updates and the introduction of features on my own network of sites (really, I've got a network,) often going from concept to production in as long as it takes me to design/code it; when playing with other people's money I tend to be the guy pointing out the scary, often ignored, dark underbelly of the grand scheme. That's because (a) it's part of my job and (b) I've done this often enough to know that there's a possibility for things to blow up at every turn. Will they? Probably not, otherwise I'd be stark, raving mad, but as these two cases have shown, things can go wrong and when they do they can be embarrassing or, in the case of Ma.gnolia, catastrophic.
(more…)

Google Chrome So Far- 1.73% Market Share

At least with my sites. Over the two weeks it's been live I've seen 26567 visits at the sites I have analytics for and 462 of them have been with Chrome.

Admittedly, the vast majority of those visits have been to this site, so it's not as broad a sampling as I would like, but it's still and interesting number after just two weeks.

For reference here are the DrunkenFist.com numbers for the two weeks it's been out

Browser Number of Visits Percentage
1. Firefox 11,279 48.76%
2. Internet Explorer 9,358 40.45%
3. Safari 890 3.85%
4. Opera 556 2.40%
5. Chrome 399 1.72%

As you can see Chrome is nipping close at Opera's heels. Can Safari be far behind? We'll see how it all plays out.

In case you were wondering… YES I do love the fact that Firefox browsers are the #1 browser of choice of DrunkenFist.com visitors.

What are other people seeing in terms of Chrome adoption?

I've Got SiteLinks

I was looking through Google's Webmaster Tools and found that the big GOOG has decided to generate SiteLinks for my site:

I've got nothing more than that to share. I just thought it was interesting.

Google Doctype – First Pass? Very cool.

Google Doctype, as introduced by Mark Pilgrim:

The open web is the web built on open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and more. The open web is a beautiful soup of barely compatible clients and servers. It comprises billions of pages, millions of users, and thousands of browser-based applications. You can access the open web with open source and proprietary browsers, on open source and proprietary operating systems, on open source and proprietary hardware.

Google has built its business here, on the open web, and we want to help you build here too. To that end, we are happy to announce the formation of an encyclopedia for web developers, by web developers: Google Doctype.

Google Code Blog: Introducing Google Doctype

Personally, I'm excited by this development (both practically and philosophically) and will likely contribute wherever it makes sense for me to lend a hand. Looking at it quickly some of the HOWTO information is already very useful (the web security information especially) and it will only improve with time as more and more dedicated people get involved with the project.