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.

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!

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.)

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

via the Google Webmaster Central Blog