The Flow of Consciousness

This is hot off the presses, folks.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today that their search engines will honor a new value for the rel attribute of link elements commonly found in the head element of a web page. This new specification aims to reduce content duplication via redundant URLs.

For instance, WordPress posts can be accessed always through the URL example.com/index.php?p=3 and often through a URL such as example.com/2009/02/12/search-engines-to-honor-canonical-urls or the like. Search engines see these separate URLs and usually think that they are duplicate content at different URLs, thus reducing the site’s ranking because of the duplicate content.

The new functionality acts not unlike a soft 301 redirect.

Check out the very informational post at Search Engine Land on the new canonical URLs. A big thanks to @badmacktuck for bringing it to my attention!

Joost de Valk wrote a WordPress plugin called wp-canonical which adds such a link element to any WordPress blog. I’m using it now. He’s also written a Drupal plugin and an informative blog about about canonical URLs, too. That was quick!

I recently noticed that WordPress added support for Gears, as have a few other sites, including ZohoOffice and MySpace.

Gears is essentially offline storage for rich Internet application data. GoogleOS has a list of Gears-enabled sites/applications. Read more on Gears at Wikipedia.

Much to my dismay, the only officially-available Firefox extension supports only 32-bit operating systems. I’m a 64-bit Linux user. Specifically, I use Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with my ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM (4GB of Geil and 4 GB of OCZ).

Fortunately, Gears is an open source project and one intrepid developer made a Gears Firefox extension package which supports 64-bit Linux.

I downloaded and installed the package by dragging and dropping it onto the Firefox Addons dialog, then restarting Firefox when prompted. I archived the Gears extension package on my own site in the event the package is suddenly no longer available. Be sure to check for new versions though, since this package may be out of date if you’re reading this post more than a few days after publication (though unlikely).

Huzzah for open source.