Rob's shared items in Google Reader

Q and A: How important is domain canonicalization to SEO?

2010-03-11T01:16:05Z

Hi Kalena

I use a company that “specializes” in mortgage sites and hosting. Since I am in the process of applying everything I am learning, I saw fit to have my site graded by one of the many online tools available.

The tool showed that my site is coming up for both the www and non www versions of my domain. When I enquired with my host about doing a 301 for my domain to one version, they said

“There is nothing we or you can reset on the Xsites as this is beyond anything we have control over. We do not support any of this nor have the capability for any one else to have it”.

How much is it going to hurt me in SEO if I don’t get this fixed like the site grader suggested?

Alex

————————————–

Hi Alex

What you’re referring to here is domain canonicalization.

Search engines can sometimes index both www and non www versions of your domain, creating duplicate content headaches for you and also link popularity dilution. Therefore, it’s best for SEO purposes if you can stick with one version of your domain and make sure all links point to that version. The www version is my recommendation because most sites will link to you using that version anyway.

Judging by the response you got from your hosts, it sounds like they’re not familiar with the issue of domain canonicalization, which is concerning. If your site host won’t allow you to use a 301 to create a conditional redirect to your preferred version, you probably need to get a new host!

Alternatively, you can use the Canonical Link Element. You can also specify your preferred URL version in Google Webmaster Tools.

My blog post Does the canonicalization of my URL impact my search engine rankings? might also be of interest.

On the Street....Mr. Cortina, Paris

2010-03-11T22:43:00Z

Oscars Best Dressed Men

2010-03-10T23:29:00Z

The men of the 2010 Oscars had a masterful showing this year. Typically there are one ore two movie starlets who steal the show with some silky-printed-flowing-back out-high slit gown but this year it was those damn XY zygotes who got all the attention. Here are a few of my favorites.

First up, and in my opinion the best dressed man of the night, Colin Firth. This Academy Award nominated actor from the film A Single Man looked absolutely dashing in this Tom Ford peak lapel suit. The guy just looked...perfect. The slim fit, the width of the lapel, the slightly flared sleeve and the "just the right size" bow tie is outstanding. The arm candy doesn't hurt either.

Jake Gyllenhaal looked fantastic as well. But more than that, he looked like a man who completely owned his look. If the Oscars were the Amazon jungle, then Jake was Bear Grylls and this Burberry tuxedo was the giant snake that he wrestled to the ground and made his bitch.

Another gold statue stand out was actor Ryan Raynolds who wore a beautiful Tom Ford tuxedo sporting a deep V lapel stance. I wish I would have seen a 'hint' of white at the cuff but other than that his look, accented with simple black and gold button studs was executed flawlessly. By the way, he's married to Scarlett Johansson so he doesn't care what you think.

Here are a few of my other favorites from the night.

Tom Ford, who presented at the awards and had a hand in dressing many of the men who got any significant camera time on Sunday, is wearing a one button shawl neck tuxedo designed and made by....(do i really have to tell you?)

Peter Sarsgaard swung for the fences with this scoop neck vest....and the ball hasn't landed yet - Outstanding!

Tyler Perry showed up at the awards as a supporter 'in kind' of the movie Precious. True story: The film was actually going straight to DVD until Tyler slipped it in Oprah's purse and she watched it about a week later.

Question: Who the hell gets close enough to Oprah to put something in her purse?

Answer: The tall black guy in the Prada tux worth about $100 million

Gerard Butler, wearing an Oscar appropriate tuxedo by a lesser known Scottish brand called '...say it again and i'll punch you in the fucking face'.

...I'm JOKING (kinda). Seriously though, how can a guy look that good and scary at the same time?

Make it an Outstanding Day!

- Kenyatte

Q and Answer: The Three-Roll-Two Benjamin writes to ask: I...

2010-03-10T23:15:02Z

Q and Answer: The Three-Roll-Two

Benjamin writes to ask: I inherited a handful of my grandfather’s tasteful suits a few years ago and am slowly having them tailored and integrated into my wardrobe. Among my favorites are a very classic Brooks Brothers navy blazer and a cotton khaki suit. Both include three-button jackets, however the lapels were folded as two-buttons leaving the third button hole exposed on the lower part of the lapel. Being under 6’, I tend to prefer a two-button jacket, so I would like to keep them folded the way they are now. But I would also like to know a little more about the style, what’s the deal here? Was it a style years ago? Is it considered tacky?

What you’ve got is probably the most classic suit buttoning style, the 3-roll-2: three buttons, with a roll in the lapel that rolls under the top button, making the coat functionally a two-button.

Three-button suits were the style of the “Friends” era, and two buttons the style of the “Cheers” era. The 3-roll-2 is a compromise. It’s found on many Savile Row single-breasteds, and is the classic buttoning for the undarted Ivy League-style “sack” suit. It’s the opposite of tacky - the epitome of class.

The great challenge will be preserving the lapel roll as such. On cheap and mishandled suits, the lapel doesn’t roll at all - it folds. Often dry cleaners will press the lapel down into the chest of the suit, flattening out the suit’s three-dimensional shape. They’ll also often press a 3-roll-2 into an awkward three-button, so be vigilant. A good tailor can steam the lapel roll for you to preserve its shape.

5 more tips for using Google Buzz on your phone

2010-03-11T20:00:00Z

Last week we shared some tips for getting the most out of Google Buzz for mobile. We're back with more ways to help you become a power buzz poster and find the most interesting buzz while you're on the go. Try these 5 tips for the Google Buzz for mobile web app (buzz.google.com) on your iPhone or Android 2.0+ device.

1. Post buzz with your voice.
You can post your public buzz simply by speaking it. From the Google Mobile App for iPhone or Quick Search Box on Android, select the voice search icon, say "post buzz" followed by the text you'd like to post, and watch your words appear. Before your post is sent, you'll be able to edit it or change its tagged location.

2. Filter the Nearby tab for a specific place.
From the Nearby tab, you can easily filter buzz by a specific place, such as a sushi restaurant you're about to walk by, to only see posts from that place. Open the menu showing nearby places, for example "Tartine Bakery and 20+ other locations nearby," and then select a specific place from the list. Now, you'll see all the public buzz anyone's ever posted from that place or you can quickly create a post that is tagged with the place. To go back, just open the same menu and select your current location shown with the blue dot. You'll once again see all the recently posted buzz around your location.

3. Search!
As you'd expect from any Google product, Google Buzz for mobile has a powerful search feature that lets you search all public buzz for topics that interest you. Open the menu or just select the magnifying glass icon to see the search bar. You can also search specifically for nearby posts by checking the "Search nearby" box before submitting your search (it's already checked if you're in the Nearby tab). Now you can find out what people around you are saying about the closest pizza spot or a traffic jam.

4. Post from your city-level location.
Tagging a post with your location is easy and adds context to your buzz posts. Sometimes, your post isn't about a specific place or you'd rather not share your exact location. You can easily show your city-level location, so your post has a general city location tagged and will be browsable in the Nearby view and Maps Buzz layer. When posting, just select the ">" in the location box, scroll down, and select the city-level location option.

5. Refresh your location.
On the other hand, sometimes you really want your location to be exact. When you visit the Nearby tab or want to tag your post with a location, Google Buzz will try to get your location using your phone's GPS. If you're not happy with the location accuracy, you're moving, or you're just stepping outside to get a GPS signal, hit the 'refresh' icon to tell the Google Buzz web app to get your location again. You can also learn more about troubleshooting location problems.

Stay tuned for more tips! Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. You can also give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.

Posted by Chris Nguyen, Product Marketing, Google Mobile

Entering The Wonderful World of Geo Location

2010-03-08T23:56:29Z

I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBSes and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don’t quite get, I thought I was safe in this area.

Then I went to my first WhereCamp, an unconference dealing with geographical issues and how they relate to the world of Web development. Even my A-Levels in Astronomy did not help me there. I was out-geeked by the people who drive and tweak the things that we now consider normal about geo-location on the Web.

Pulling out your phone, find your location and getting directions to the nearest bar is easy, but a lot of work has gone into making that possible. The good news is that because of that effort, mere geo-mortals like you and me can now create geographically aware products using a few lines of code. So, let’s give the geo-community a big hand.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

Why Geo Matters

First of all, why is it important to consider physical location on this planet (at this moment) when we develop Web products? There are a few answers to this.

The first answer is mobility. The days of people sitting in front of desktop machines at home are over. Sales of mobile devices, laptops and netbooks have overtaken those of bulky stationary computers in the last few years. The power of processors now allows us to use smaller, more mobile hardware to perform the same tasks. So, if people use their hardware on the go, we should bring our systems to them. Which brings us to the second—very important—point: relevance.

Giving the user content that is relevant to the physical space they are in at the moment makes a lot of sense. We are creatures of habit. While we love the reach of the Internet, we also want to be able to find things in our local area easily: people to meet, cafes to frequent, interesting buildings and museums to learn about. The advertising industry—especially of the adult and dating variety—realized this years ago. I am sure you have come across one of the following before:

I am sure these ads are more successful than the ones that show only user names. That the photos and names are the same for every location doesn’t seem to be a problem (but yes, I noticed it). So how does it all work?

Getting The User’s Location Via IP

Every computer on a network has a number that identifies it: its IP address. The Internet is nothing but a massive network, and your IP number is assigned to you by the service provider that you have used to connect to that network. Because the numbers that service providers assign change from one geographical location to the next (much like telephone numbers), you can make quite a good estimate of where your visitors are from.

To find out where a certain phone number is from, you use a phone book. To find out where an IP is from, you can use the Maxmind GeoIP database. Maxmind also provides a JavaScript solution that you can use on websites:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script>
<script>
  var info = document.getElementById('info');
  var lat = geoip_latitude();
  var lon = geoip_longitude();
  var city = geoip_city();
  var out = '<h3>Information from your IP</h3>'+
            '<ul>'+
            '<li>Latitude: ' + lat + '</li>'+
            '<li>Longitude: ' + lon + '</li>'+
            '<li>City: ' + city + '</li>'+
            '<li>Region: ' + geoip_region() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Region Name: ' + geoip_region_name() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Postal Code: ' + geoip_postal_code() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Country Code: ' + geoip_country_code() + '</li>'+
            '<li>Country Name: ' + geoip_country_name() + '</li>'+
            '</ul>'
  info.innerHTML = out;
</script>

This gives you some information on the user (try it out for yourself). The challenge, though, is relevance. Your IP location is the location of the IP that your provider has assigned to you. Depending on your provider, this could be quite a ways off (in my case, I live in London, but my provider used to show me as living in Rochester). Another problem is if you work for a company that uses a VPN. At Yahoo, for example, I have to connect to the VPN to read my company email, and I have to choose a location to connect to:

So, for a solution like the one highlighted above, I would show up as being in a totally different part of the world (which might be useful for watching Internet TV in the UK while I am in the US). IP geo-location, then, is an approximation, not a dead-on science.

Getting The User’s Location Via The W3C Geo API

Guessing geographical location via IP is possible, but it can also be pretty creepy. Being able to take advantage of your location is useful, but security-conscious users and people who are generally suspicious of the Internet are not happy with the idea of their movements being monitored by a computer. This makes sense: if I can monitor your whereabouts day and night, I would know where and when to rob your house without you being there.

There are a lot of solutions to the challenge of having good-quality geo-location and maintaining privacy. Google Gears has a geo-location service; Plazes helps you store your location; and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is probably the most polished way to securely maintain your location on the Web.

The problem with all of these services is that they require the user to either install a plug-in or visit a Web service to update their location. This is not fun; browsers should do the work for you.

We now have a W3C recommendation for a geo-location API that allows browsers to request the geographical location of the user. This makes it less creepy, and you get real data back.

Firefox 3.5 and above supports the W3C geo-location API. So does Safari on the iPhone if you run OS 3.0 or above. If you use the API, the browser will ask the user whether they want to share their location with your website.

Once the user allows you to get their location, you get much more detailed latitude and longitude values. Using the API is very easy:

// if the browser supports the w3c geo api
if(navigator.geolocation){
  // get the current position
  navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(

  // if this was successful, get the latitude and longitude
  function(position){
    var lat = position.coords.latitude;
    var lon = position.coords.longitude;
  },
  // if there was an error
  function(error){
    alert('ouch');
  });
}

Compare the IP and W3C solutions side by side. As you can see, there can be quite a difference in measuring the visitor’s location. The extent of the difference is shown in the following demo:

Converting Latitude And Longitude Back Into A Name

Having more information is nice, but we have lost the name of the city and all the other nice data that came with the Maxmind database. Because the location has changed, we cannot just grab that old data; we have to find a way to convert latitude and longitude coordinates into a name. This process is called “reverse geo-coding,” and several services on the Web allow you to do it. Probably the most well-known is the geo-names Web service, but it has a few issues. For starters, the results are very US-centric.

One freely available but lesser-known reverse geo-coder that works worldwide comes from a surprising source: Flickr. The flickr.places.findByLatLon service returns a location from a latitude and longitude coordinates. You can try it out in the app explorer, but by far the easiest way to use it is by using the Yahoo Query Language (or YQL). YQL deserves its own article, but let’s just say that, instead of having to authenticate with the Flickr API and read the docs, reverse geo-coding becomes as easy as this:

select * from flickr.places where lat=37.416115 and lon=-122.0245671

Using the YQL Web service, you can get the result back as XML or JSON. So, to use the service in JavaScript, all you need is the following:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
 function getPlaceFromFlickr(lat,lon,callback){
   // the YQL statement
   var yql = 'select * from flickr.places where lat='+lat+' and lon='+lon;

   // assembling the YQL webservice API
   var url = 'http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q='+
              encodeURIComponent(yql)+'&format=json&diagnostics='+
              'false&callback='+callback;

   // create a new script node and add it to the document
   var s = document.createElement('script');
   s.setAttribute('src',url);
   document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
 };

 // callback in case there is a place found
 function output(o){
   if(typeof(o.query.results.places.place) != 'undefined'){
     alert(o.query.results.places.place.name);
   }
 }

 // call the function with my current lat/lon
 getPlaceFromFlickr(37.416115,-122.02456,'output');
</script>

Combine that with the other services, and we get a more detailed result and can put a name to the coordinates:

The Trouble With Latitude And Longitude

While latitude and longitude coordinates are a good way to describe a location on Earth, it is also ambiguous. The coordinates could represent either the centre of a city or a point of interest (such as a museum or a pub) in that spot.

WOEID to the Rescue

To work around the problem, Yahoo and Flickr (and soon will Twitter) support another way to pinpoint a location. The Where On Earth Identifier (or WOEID) is a more granular way to describe locations on Earth. Because Flickr supports it, we can easily get get photos from a particular area:

select * from flickr.photos.search where woe_id in (
  select place.woeid from flickr.places where lat=37.416115 and lon=-122.02456
)

Using this and a few lines of JavaScript, showing geo-located photos is pretty easy:

This has also been wrapped in a simple-to-use YQL solution. The following code will display 10 photos of Paris:

<script>
  function photos(o){
    var container = document.getElementById('photos');
    container.innerHTML = o.results;
  }
</script>
<script src="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=
select%20*%20from%20flickr.photolist%20where%20location%3D%22paris%2Cfr
%22%20and%20text%3D%22%22%20and%20amount%3D10&format=xml&
env=store%3A%2F%2Fdatatables.org%2Falltableswithkeys&callback=photos">

You can also play with this in the YQL console.

Why Not Search For The Location’s Name?

The main question about implementations such as the one above is why couldn’t we just do a search on Flickr for the city, instead of doing all the complex geo-lookups? The reason is false positives. Take Paris, for example: if you want to show photos of Paris on a travel website, you don’t want Paris Hilton to show up in there. Same goes for Jack London. You may also want to show photos of London, England, not London, Ontario. Geographic data is full of these kinds of gotchas, and the term for finding the right one is “disambiguation.” See the Wikipedia article on “Victoria” to see just how many geographical contexts this term can have.

Turning Text Into Geo-Data

Finding a visitor’s geographic location is all well and good, but it doesn’t mean much if you can’t link it to information for that area. This is where it gets tricky. For Flickr (and soon Twitter), this is easy, because both services are able to attach geographical locations to the content you put in them. This is not so for most of the information on the Web, though, and this is when we resort to clever algorithms, machine-learning, pattern-matching and all the other think-tank stuff that computers and the scientists in front of them do.

Say you want to identify the geographical locations that a particular text or Web page talks about. Yahoo offers a service for that called Placemaker, and it is pretty easy to use. You need to get a developer key and send this as appid, send a text as documentContent, define the type of the text as documentType and define the type of data you want back as outputType. All of this needs to be sent as a POST to http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document:

<form action="http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/document" method="post">
  <textarea id="text" name="documentContent">Hi there, I am Chris.
    I live in London, I am currently in Sunnyvale and will soon be in
    Atlanta and Las Vegas.</textarea>
  <div><input type="submit" name="sub" value="get locations"></div>
  <input type="hidden" name="appid" value="{YOUR_APP_ID}">
  <input type="hidden" name="documentType" value="text/plain">
  <input type="hidden" name="outputType" value="xml">
</form>

You can try this out yourself. Using PHP to call the API instead of a simple form, you can even format the output nicely. See it in action here:

While developers who have played around with Web services won’t find Placemaker hard to use, the service can be daunting for the average developer. That is why I built GeoMaker some time ago. GeoMaker allows you to enter a text or URL, select the locations you want to include in the final outcome, and get the locations either as a map to copy and paste or as micro-formats.

However, because there is also a YQL solution for using PlaceMaker in JavaScript, we can do the same with a few lines of client-side code to enhance an HTML document. Check out the following example:

To use this, you need three things: a text with geographical locations in them in an element with an ID, a Google Maps API key (which you can get here) and the following few lines of code:

<script src="http://github.com/codepo8/geotoys/raw/master/addmap.js"></script>
<script>
addmap.config.mapkey = 'COPY YOUR API KEY HERE';
addmap.analyse('content');
</script>

This makes it incredibly easy to give your visitors a sense of what part of the world a text is related to.

Adding Maps To Your Documents

Online maps have been around for a while now (and Google Maps was instrumental in the rise of AJAX), and many providers out there allow you to add maps to your documents. Google is probably the leader, but Yahoo also has maps, as does Microsoft and many more. There is even a fully open map service called Open Street Maps, which has been instrumental in the recent rescue efforts in Haiti.

If you want interactive maps, probably the easiest thing to use is Mapstraction, which is a JavaScript library that does away with the discrepancies between the various map providers and gives you a single interface for all of them. 24ways published a good introduction to it three years ago.

Probably the simplest way to show a map that supports markers and paths in your document without having to dive into JavaScript is the Google static maps API. It creates maps as images, and all you need to do is provide the map information in the src URI of the image. For example, in the script example above, this would be:

http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?
sensor=false
&size=200x200
&maptype=roadmap
&key=YOUR_MAP_KEY
&markers=color:blue|label:1|37.4447,-122.161
&markers=color:blue|label:2|37.3385,-121.886
&markers=color:blue|label:3|37.3716,-122.038
&markers=color:blue|label:4|37.7792,-122.42

You can define the size and type of the map. If all you provide is the location of markers, the API will automatically find the right zoom level and area to ensure that all markers are visible. Google’s website even offers a detailed tool to create static maps, including markers and paths.

Geo Is A Space To Watch

I hope this has given you some insight into all of the things you can do to bring the earth to your product and to put your product on the map. Geo-location and geo-aware services are already huge, and they’ll be even more important this year. There will be more services—some mobile providers are ready to roll out new hardware and software—and now you can be a part of it.

What the geo-world needs now is a designer’s eye, and this is where you can help the geo-geeks create apps that matter, that look great and that make a difference in our visitors’ lives. For inspiration, check out Mapumental, which allows you to pinpoint a place to live in London, or see how Google Earth and some 3-D Objects allow you to race a milk truck on real map data.

(al)

Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

2010-03-09T09:00:16Z

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently announced the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn't technology, but people.

HTML Minification

2010-03-10T11:14:51Z

Good old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage.

What does it do?

Kangax has forked John Resig's HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled="true" -> disabled).

He also has a linter going:

While working on minifier, I realized that oftentimes the most wasteful part of the markup is not white space, comments or boolean attributes, but inline styles, scripts, presentational or deprecated elements and attributes. None of these can be simply stripped, as that could affect state of the document and is just too obtrusive. What can be done, however, is reporting of these occurences to the user. HTMLLint is even a smaller script, whose job is exactly that—to log any deprecated or presentational elements/attributes encountered during parsing. Additionally, it detects event attributes (e.g. onclick, onmouseover, etc.). The rationale for this is that moving contents of event attributes to external script allows to take advantage of resource caching.

John Steed of the Avengers

2010-03-10T08:39:54Z

photos: moviesmedia.ign.com , dissolute.com.au

The Importance of A / B Design Testing

2010-03-09T14:30:50Z

For many developers, launching a site is not the end of the design process. To continually improve the success of their design, these developers turn to A/B testing. This relatively simple process can teach you loads about what your users are looking for as well as what they ignore or find unimportant.

Today we’ll take a quick look at what A/B testing is, the benefits of implementing it, and some tools to get you going.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is extremely simple in concept. It’s basically testing the effectiveness of different designs to find the optimum solution. These tests are usually performed on live sites with real users who are completely unaware of the test. To clarify, lets look at an example.

Is Bigger Better?

Let’s say Vanilla Forums wanted to know if their current homepage could be improved by increasing the size of the sign up button. The first thing they would do is create an alternate version of their page containing the desired revisions. The image below shows their current page followed by the page they’d like to test:

As you can see, the new version differs enough to theoretically impact the way users perceive the page. However, in order to get a good idea of the impact of the placement of that single button, we haven’t moved much else on the page. You can of course use this method to test the difference between two completely different designs, but the thing I really want to highlight is that A/B testing provides you with solid information on how to improve a current design without making a complete overhaul of the site.

Now Vanilla Forums would setup their site to show version one to half the visitors for a specified amount of time and version two to the rest. Then they would compare the results of the two pages to see which snagged the greatest amount of users (using some tools we’ll discuss later).

Benefits

I’m sure you can immediately name several of the benefits this method would bring to your own site. Let’s go over a few.

It’s Easy!

First and foremost, moderate A/B testing is neither expensive nor difficult to implement all on your own; no expensive consultants or outside agencies required. It definitely takes some work but fortunately there are some great resources out there to help you do the heavy lifting.

Hard Evidence

Using A/B testing lays to rest any usability arguments you might be having around the office or even within your own mind. If your team is torn over two possible scenarios for your site, you can have the various parties dispute the matter all day long but the bottom line is you simply can’t know for certain what will appeal to your users most without testing it out in the real world. A/B testing provides you with an easy way to prove who is right through actual statistics from user interactions.

Incremental Improvement

I’ll again stress that one of they key pieces of potential here is the ability to incrementally improve the interface and/or messaging on your site. As a site owner, this can provide you with a solid way to improve your earnings over time. As a developer, this could provide you with a way to form long-term contracts with your clients.

Things to Keep in Mind

Despite the straightforward nature of the concept of A/B testing, there are several things you should be aware of and considering as you implement it on your site.

What’s Your Goal?

“Better” is quite the relative term. You can’t know if one page is better than another unless you define the terms of the judgement. Similarly, when performing a test, you can’t run wildly into it without consideration of what it is you want to observe. For instance, the Vanilla Forums example above was meant to increase the number of users that click the button to sign up for the service. Note that this is a clear goal that is easily testable, not simply a vague statement regarding the aesthetic nature of one layout over another.

There are several possible goals and metrics to use when testing the efficacy of one design over another. These include the total time spent on the site, the number of pages visited, the percentage of users who navigated to a specific page, etc.

There Won’t Always Be a Clear Winner

Despite the fact that A/B testing can give you clear proof of the superiority of one design over another, sometimes the result isn’t so clear cut. It’s possible that something that you imagined would play a key role in the actions of the users doesn’t really affect them in any significant way. Further, even if you observe a difference, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the difference was a result of the variable. Basic statistical principles prevent a degree of random fluctuation between the results of each version, the goal is to spot differences beyond what would normally occur even if each of the two groups received the same page. Keep in mind that the more users you have to take part in the test, the greater the accuracy of the results.

Resist the urge to nit-pick every tiny portion of your site and change something every time you see the slightest increase in conversions. Look for significant ways to improve your site through clearly met goals.

Multivariate Testing is Also Possible

If you want to go beyond testing the effect of a single variable, multivariate testing provides a way to change up the mix of elements shown to a given user to track which variables have the greatest impact.

Tools and Resources

Now that we’ve briefly gone over the ins and outs of A/B testing, I’m sure you’re eager to get started. Check out these great resources to get you on your way to enhancing your sites.

Google Website Optimizer

If you’re just getting started with A/B testing, Google Website Optimizer should be your first stop. It’s fairly straightforward and easy to use and has a lot of resources to walk you through the process of testing (A/B or multivariate). Best of all: it’s completely free.

Alternatives to Google

If you’re not impressed with Google’s offerings, check out these other options.

Visual Website Optimizer

SiteSpect

Vertster

ABTests

More Info

Want to know more about A/B testing? Check out these other great articles.

Conclusion

You should now be equipped to begin testing your site for potential improvements. Get started today and let us know in the comments below what section of your site you think A/B testing is most appropriate for.

RGB Light by Fabian Nehne and Martin Meier

2010-03-06T13:40:36Z

Every Sailor Should Have One.....

2010-03-09T13:59:50Z

.......And a good client in USA now has one , and 'one', is a kidney attachment. You can probably guess the reason from the photographs, but if not, the kidney attachment allows him to keep his neck warm when the wind whips across Mirror Lake NH where he sails his boat. When he comes ashore it is easily removed and fastened on the inside of the jacket. How cool is all this, and it certainly compliments his incredible boat.

I find that sometimes the extra effort involved in dressing well...

2010-03-09T02:34:52Z

I find that sometimes the extra effort involved in dressing well isn’t a burden, but rather, a comfort.

(Talcahuano, Chile. Photo by Ricardo Mazalan)

(Thanks Jon)

Is Opera 10.5 the Best Browser Ever?

2010-03-09T12:06:38Z

Opera has one of the most rapid browser release schedules and 10.5 is now available — just in time for Microsoft’s EU browser choice screen. You’ll need to download it from Opera.com, although automatic updates from previous versions will appear shortly.

Opera 10.5 is a significant update — other browser vendors would have bumped up the major version number. Here’s what you can expect:

excellent W3C standards support
a private browsing mode
native widgets — independent applications which continue to work when the browser isn’t running
a new interface
a new JavaScript and graphics engine — Opera claim it’s the fastest browser on Earth.

These last two aspects are the biggest changes…

Stunning Surfing

Opera’s always been one of the better-looking browsers, but Jon Hicks has made 10.5 look glorious. The most noticeable change is the Chrome-like removal of the title bar and menu.

The red ‘O’ icon can be clicked to access the most frequently-used options and show the menu bar if you want it.

The whole interface can be configured to your taste. Icons can be added and removed, panels can be re-arranged, and even the window color can be changed.

It’s also the first non-Microsoft browser to offer a fully-integrated Windows 7/Vista experience with Aero, jumplists and taskbar tab support. It’s a welcome addition and many users will appreciate the productivity benefits.

Finally, Opera has removed the irritating modal dialog boxes and replaced them with page overlays or panels. “Find in Page” is the best I’ve seen — it dims the page content and highlights all instances of the word. I expect competing browsers will replicate that feature soon.

Superior Speed

Although it has a reputation for speed, Google Chrome appeared to overtake Opera during the past year.

Opera is making bold claims about their new Carakan JavaScript engine. I tested it using the SunSpider benchmark and Opera came out top. It was only 1% faster than Chrome, but more than twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. JavaScript benchmarks don’t tell the whole story and your experience could be different, but the engine is certainly one of the quickest.

Every vendor claims their browser is the fastest — even Microsoft — and “proof” can be offered with tests that exploit known optimizations. However, one of the best independent reviews of the top five browsers is available at Tom’s Hardware. In summary:

Opera and Chrome come out top, but Chrome just edges ahead with more second places.
Opera is especially fast when handling plugins such as Flash, Silverlight and Java. YouTube pages load are almost twice as fast as Firefox and three times faster than Chrome.
Opera’s memory usage is higher for a single tab, although the differences reduce as more tabs are opened.

Forget the charts, though. Browser margins in most of the tests are measured in milliseconds and the differences will be imperceivable. What matters is how fast the browser feels to you on your machine. In my experience, Opera is more than a match for Chrome and it offers far more features.

Is Opera “the fastest browser on Earth”? I find no reason to dispute their claim.

Switch Straightaway?

OK, so Opera’s fast. It looks fabulous. It has more features out of the box than any competitor. It offers great developer tools. Standards support is excellent and it’s usually the first to pass ACID tests. And almost every aspect of the browser can customized or configured.

Yet it’s not my default browser. Opera retains a tiny 2% market share which has barely changed during the past decade. Continue reading The Problem With Opera…

Have you switched to Opera 10.5? What do you love about the browser? What do you dislike?

Can Opera Ever Become Popular? Opera is one of the fastest and most innovative browsers....
Opera 10 Final Released Opera 10 is the latest and greatest browser from the...
What’s New in Opera 10 (Part 1) Opera 10 is now available as a beta download. In...

1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity

2010-03-09T07:47:00Z

Since 1977, RSA public-key encryption has protected privacy and verified authenticity when using computers, gadgets and web browsers around the globe, with only the most brutish of brute force efforts (and 1,500 years of processing time) felling its 768-bit variety earlier this year. Now, three eggheads (or Wolverines, as it were) at the University of Michigan claim they can break it simply by tweaking a device's power supply. By fluctuating the voltage to the CPU such that it generated a single hardware error per clock cycle, they found that they could cause the server to flip single bits of the private key at a time, allowing them to slowly piece together the password. With a small cluster of 81 Pentium 4 chips and 104 hours of processing time, they were able to successfully hack 1024-bit encryption in OpenSSL on a SPARC-based system, without damaging the computer, leaving a single trace or ending human life as we know it. That's why they're presenting a paper at the Design, Automation and Test conference this week in Europe, and that's why -- until RSA hopefully fixes the flaw -- you should keep a close eye on your server room's power supply.

1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Register, TechWorld | University of Michigan | Email this | Comments

Microsoft to Run a Massive Bing TV Campaign in the UK

2010-03-08T08:07:43Z

The Guardian UK is reporting that Microsoft Bing is preparing to launch a massive TV ad campaign aimed at challenging Google’s dominance in the UK search market. According to the report, the series of Bing promotional TV ads is set to begin airing this week and will be promoting Bing as a “decision engine.”

Microsoft has contracted the services of ad agency JWT. It aims to show how Bing simplifies the “information overload” that accompanies the results of other search engines – obviously hitting on Google.

Microsoft’s UK managing director Ashley Highfield said that people worldwide may have forgotten that there is an alternative search engine.

“People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching,” said Highfield.

The said TV ad campaign feature ordinary people asking for information and getting their answers from Bing, will run for a month and then on a two-week bursts until Mid-June. Backing up the Bing TV ad campaign is an equally massive digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and other media including social networking sites.

It looks like Microsoft is on the final stretch of its promotional campaign for Bing and is now desperate to gain more users even if it cost the company around $2 billion.

This is clearly stated by Mr. Highfield with the following statement:

“It is a battle not just of mind but of heart as well. We are wanting to make an emotional connection – we are ploughing a different furrow here.”

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Microsoft to Run a Massive Bing TV Campaign in the UK

Google Buys Online Collaboration Operator DocVerse

2010-03-06T13:50:04Z

Google seems to be prepping up its online collaboration and cloud computing tools – Google Docs for the big league. Just recently, Google Docs supported uploading fo files from your computer and sharing that files with people you collaborate with via Google Docs. Now, something good is about to happen with Google’s cloud computing service – that is interoperability with Microsoft Office files. To make this happen, Google just bought DocVerse.

DocVerse has allowed true collaboration feature right within Microsoft Office and by purchasing this company, Google wants to bring in DocVerse’s technology. This is of course to encourage more people to use cloud computing rather than the old desktop application settings.

DocVerse will be bringing in plug-ins that will add standard Microsoft Office operation including real-time editing and online saving.

As for other good things that DocVerse is bringing into Google Docs, that is yet to be known as even Google has not yet announced this acquisition. But according to the WSJ, Google paid a handsome amount of $25 million to DocVerse aside from other perks.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Buys Online Collaboration Operator DocVerse

The Ingredients of a Successful Website

2010-03-08T12:28:01Z

The ingredients of a recipe for the success and growth of a website.

Unicode Characters for Class Names

2010-03-05T13:15:48Z

Reader Kartlos emailed me in pointing to me to an interesting article by the great Mr. Snook from a few years back. I don’t think I had seen it before and it’s a bonafide “CSS Trick” so I thought I would share.

The idea is that you can use unicode characters (read: fancy symbols) for class names in your HTML, and even use write CSS selectors with those same characters.

<div class="♫">
    A.A. Bondy
    <em>I Can See The Pines Are Dancing</em>
</div>

.♫ {
   display: block;
   background: #eee;
   padding: 5px;
 }

Pretty cool eh? I’d call my example above perfectly semantic as well, since the div with the music note class name is marking up a musician and song. Possibly even more semantic, as a music note symbolizes music moreso than any English word.

I put together a super simple demo page that shows it working. Oh, and yes-it-works-in-IE6™ & yes-it-validates™

But…

One funny thing? View the source on that page. I use PHP includes for the headers and footers of all my demos, and because of the character encoding (?) of that page the PHP doesn’t run it just sits there as text.

That ain’t right.

Coda does warn you first.

Weird eh? If you know how this could work both ways, let me know.

Other uses

Jonathan presented (in his original article) and idea for targeting the corners of a box.

<div class="□">
  <div class="┌">
    <div class="┐">
      <div class="└">
        <div class="┘">
          content
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
</div>

Remember back a few years ago most of us were rocking rounded corners with nested divs and images like that! The corners symbols are clever, but I could see the <div class="□"> being used for like “container” or “box” style classes today, or, perhaps best of all, the clearfix.

I posted a little code clip of this over on Forrst (sorry I know most folks don’t have accounts there yet) and a guy named Aaron had a funny idea. Using upside down writing to be annoying! id='ɹǝpɐǝɥ', id='ɹǝddɐɹʍ', id='ɹǝʇooɟ'

Set iPhone Bookmark Icon

2010-03-01T21:40:03Z

Place this in your <head> section, and set the href attribute to an image to a 57px x 57px PNG file.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="iphone-icon.png"/>

To prevent the iPhone from adding it’s own gloss:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="icon" />