Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Yahoo!
Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver

Avoiding duplicates in the search engine index has consistently been a key concern we’ve heard from webmasters and site owners. Over the last few years, we have made significant strides in finding duplicates in our crawler and index algorithmically and provided webmasters with better tools for controlling these. Today we are announcing our support for a new HTML tag, the tag, which helps reduce duplicates by documenting the preferred URL form to access each page.

*yes, I'm done. Three days, a lot of careful planning and more regular expressions that I've ever written later, everything on my site is now cool like this ( http://www.drunkenfist.com/art/graffiti-art/black-book/index.php ) Dash heaven.

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.

Of course, none of this should be stopping anyone from doing fun and interesting things with web sites. You simply can't innovate and create great sites and applications without some risk. Risk/reward and all that. It's just a really good thing to acknowledge and minimize that risk wherever possible and prepare for negative events so as to soften their impact on your business if they do occur.

These two incidents illustrate that point as well. Google, with teams and processes in place to deal with just such emergencies, were able to restore service to normal across their network in what they're saying was under an hour (most people I know saw it for only 20 minutes or so.) Ma.gnolia, on the other hand, seems to have taken a somewhat riskier approach and are still down, suffering what appears to be a complete loss of user data* (and, I imagine, basically the end of the site.)

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

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

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.