Will valid markup now help your Google ranking?
Google recently published a list of 30 updates made to search over the tail end of 2011. Tucked away in the middle of the list is mention of improved support for rich snippets. The snippet types listed are shopping, recipes and reviews. Amongst the other information on rich snippets is listed a point that a snippet can only be given for a page with a single item upon it, ruling out snippets for things like searches for ipods on amazon.
However it looks like google has also been testing out ways of extracting structured data from pages which have no defined snippet and contain multiple items - starting with real estate classifieds. What's equally interesting here is that it seems having clear and valid markup may have an extra impact on your site's appearance in the Google results and number of visitors clicking through!
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich
In the film Being John Malkovich, John Cusack plays a puppeteer who finds a portal to inside John Malkovich's head. Eventually John Malkovich himself goes through this portal, and the ensuing paradox means that every word he hears is "Malkovich", and every face he sees is his own.
Re-watching this film lately gave me an idea for the latest trivial entry in my ongoing bookmarklets collection, where every image on a website is changed to show the same one. So read below the jump to find out how to Malkovich a website - or customise the effect to use an image of your choosing!
.length; i++){var swapH = document.getElementsByTagName('img')[i].height; var swapW = document.getElementsByTagName('img')[i].width; document.getElementsByTagName('img')[i].src=newImg;document.getElementsByTagName('img')[i].height = swapH; document.getElementsByTagName('img')[i].width = swapW;};void(0);){kind=link}
Programmatically Detecting AdBlock Plus
One issue that comes up time and again when working on classified sites such as Daft.ie and Adverts.ie is the inadvertent blocking of site functionality by the AdBlock Plus extension. As so many parts of classified sites will logically have phrases like "ad" in the url, legitimate site content and features can be blocked inadvertently under the mistaken assumption that they're banner ads or the like.
So is there a way to detect whether a user has AdBlock Plus installed and change the output accordingly?
Extending Twitter – adding Imgur previews
Enabling Imgur preview in Twitter
Update 08/12/2010 - There's now a Firefox Extension in the Add-Ons sandbox available for adding this media preview to Twitter, as well as previews for Daft.ie and Adverts.ie ads.
With their recent site redesign, Twitter added a number of interesting new features. One of the more useful of these is the media preview. From the Twitter blog:
Media. Now, it’s easy to see embedded photos and videos directly on Twitter, thanks to partnerships with DailyBooth, deviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
This is definitely one of the more useful features of the new Twitter web interface, and covers most of the more mainstream media sources that I'd notice showing up in my timeline. That said, there are some notable omissions..
But how will the markets react?
Over the last few weeks, as Ireland has continued a head-long dive in to a financial abyss, it seems that every policy proposal, every political criticism and even every newspaper editorial has met the default response of "how will the markets react?"
Analytics eccentricities
Back around the start of March, I noticed that pretty much every time I logged in to Google Analytics I was running in to problems with the summary views.
The dashboard would typically load up my list of sites, then freeze without actually fetching any data. Refreshing the page would usually sort this out, before the same thing happened again when I click in to a site's individual profile.
Still loading..
A Grab Bag of Bookmarklets
A (semi-) frequently updated list of simple bookmarklets I've found somewhat useful. Some of the more complex ones for use on twitter.com (Custom filtering of the timeline and Hovercard removal) are discussed in more detail elsewhere on the site. The below are a collection of short and sweet bookmarklets that do a simple but effective job.
Bookmarklets – a quick explanation!
I've been tinkering quite a bit lately with improving the twitter web interface with the use of bookmarklets. I've put together a series of bookmarklets which allow you to do everything from apply custom filters to your twitter timeline, to removing the "Hovercards" which Twitter have recently added.
Most of the feedback I've received both in the comments here and on twitter has been very positive, but I've also heard from a few folk who have had difficulty actually saving the bookmarklets and getting them to work.
Admittedly, the posts on the bookmarklets did assume a certain level of technical know-how, so this post is intended as a quick intro for those who want to use the bookmarklets, but aren't quite sure where to start.
DeCluttering Twitter, Part Deux
If you're just here to learn how to kill the Twitter Hovercards, then drag the Hovercard Removal bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar, go twitter.com, click it and you're done!
Read on if you're in any way curious about the technical errata behind this..
Most of my twitter usage comes via applications that makes use of the API, such as Tweetie on the iPhone or the Echofon plugin for Firefox. However, I still spend a considerable amount of my time a-tweetin' via the web interface.
For the most part, twitter's web interface is reasonably clean, but there are still a few niggly bits that I'd rather do without. Luckily, one of the beauties of the web interface is that it allows the usage of bookmarklets, so if there's something you don't like, a quick line of javascript in the browser's address bar will sort it out!
I've written previously about using bookmarklets to hide tweets from your timeline that contain blacklisted words (sport-related, xbox achievements, etc). The next step is now to use bookmarklets to tweak the web interface itself. A nice side-effect of Twitter's use of jQuery for the web interface is that all of the jQuery selectors and functions are available to us, should we need them.
We'll start by hiding the Hovercard!
DeClutter
Updated 28/03/2010 - changed how the bookmarklet re-applies itself to now work in realtime, rather than at clumsy, staggered intervals.
Twitter can be a very useful tool, particularly once you've built up a decent-sized network of people with interests common to your own. The twitter timeline is often compared to being in a pub filled exclusively with your friends, and being able to hear all of the conversations going on at once.
However, just as you have that friend who occasionally likes to go in to excrutiating detail about his collection of porcelain squirrels, there are times when your interests diverge and you'd rather not hear the full details of next weekend's Porcelainathon. And so it is with Twitter.
Once you've started following more than a handful of people, you'll occasionally find your timeline filling up with tweets about things that you're really not that interested in. You'd rather not take the nuclear option and unfollow those involved, as they generally have interesting/useful tweets. But equally you'd rather not have to scroll through 3 pages of automated tweets about foursquare checkins, app downloads and the like.
Enter DeClutter
DeClutter is a javascript bookmarklet which will remove from your timeline any tweets which match a "blacklist" of keywords you've defined.
Below you can enter a series of terms which you want to banish from your timeline (one term per line). After entering them, you can either copy and paste the resulting javascript in to a bookmarklet in your browser, or drag the DeClutter link at the bottom of the page to your browser's bookmarks bar.