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.
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That's an unwieldy title, if I ever saw (wrote?) one. Still it describes the code in question exactly, so unwieldy will have to do for this post.

Anyway, for SEO purposes I've wanted to rename some of my files from underscore delineated (_) to hyphen delineated (-) for a couple of years now. I chose wrong when I originally launched this site, and since it's huge (something like 400 static pages), I never wanted to actually go through with the renaming. And that was before I got the site into Subversion. With Subversion in place I couldn't even use one of the many little file renaming apps out there. I'd have to do the work within SVN or else things would be bad. Very bad.

A disheartening problem.
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As long as you're happy with 5 being the definition of an explosion

Craftsmanship

Markup & Style Society Talk – Bokardo

"For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well."

Not the greatest slideshare, but the very thought of it speaks to me as I'm trying to improve quality across the presentation layer at work and getting people to think in those terms is a key to getting the work I want to see produced on a consistent basis.

Wayback machine

jwz – Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

jwz has resurrected a ton of old Netscape/Mosaic history, including the old Mosaic Communications Corporation web site and some ancient versions of their software (with which to browse it.)

SEO

Free Firefox Rank Checker – Check Your Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Search Engine Rankings : SEO Book.com

Pretty self-explanatory, no? I took it for a test drive this morning and it's a fine tool.

A New Blog I Love

The Leila Texts

When you send a text message on the Verizon network, you can address your text by choosing a name out of your contact list, or you can address it by typing in a phone number. You can also type in a name. And if you type in L-E-I-L-A, then– bizarrely– your text will come to me.
This is a blog about the texts I have received. All of them are from strangers, intended for other Leilas, but obviously they missed their marks.

Just read it. It's not a big time investment and it's interesting/funny/weird/cool.

Creative Wins at PR

Message to Daniel_K – Sound Blaster – Creative Labs

Description cribbed from metafilter:

"A geek named daniel_k wanted to help his fellow Vista users. He created a set of drivers that would get their Creative sound cards working under Vista — something beyond the ken and expertise of Creative's engineering team. Creative VP Phil O'Shaughnessy, however, took umbrage. The results? A PR disaster with hundreds of users pledging to boycott. "

It made slashdot, digg, reddit, etc. Nice work Creative!

In the post announcing that Yahoo! search results now has natural language support, the YDN blog offers up two audio samples that illustrate a screen reader reading mixed language text with and without the lang attribute. As you can plainly hear, the lang="fr" attribute makes a great difference in the performance of the screen reader when handling mixed language text.

As they point out, the attribute also allows search engines to more easily parse stop words, so there's an SEO benefit as well.

The lesson here? Polyglots unite! In using the lang attribute.

(Now I run off to add it myself to all the French,Italian, etc. phrases I've got littered around the site.)

This is the second in his series of video talks published to the Google Webmaster Central blog. I eat this stuff up. I love detailed explanations like this. I feel like I'm armoring up with knowledge There's not much new in this piece for me, to be honest, but it's still worth a look if you're not sure about the mysterious use of the ALT tag*.

*everyone calls them "alt tags", but they're really an attribute.