How to actually work

Don’t tell anyone (particularly not your clients and especially not my clients) but making websites is really very easy. Don't make it harder by deliberately hindering yourself. You should always try to travel the shortest distance between “amends needs done” and “amend is done”. Again, I hear a “Pah!” in the distance, “Well, that’s obvious.”, but is it? Are you sure you’re ‘Being all you can be’?

The shortest distance

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. The washing is in a pile in the corner of the room. You hunch over, pick up all the socks, pants, t-shirts and walk, waddle and totter to the washing machine. As you walk, you drop a sock and bend down to pick it up, dropping another. You recover that one and another falls. Eventually, you make it to the washing machine after a few minutes, put everything in, throw in some powder and set it going. As you head back to your bedroom, you spot three more socks that you missed. Darn.

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. Fortunately, every time you took your socks off, you put them straight in the washing machine. You wander to the kitchen, put in the powder and switch it on. Done.

Any time you try to do anything, the more steps involved between intention and completion, the more likely it is to go wrong. Whether the intention is 'wear clean socks' or 'update this website', if you can do it in a handful of steps, you'll make fewer mistakes than if you have to do it in a hunched-over armful.

Workflow. The flow. Of Work.

The next time you're making an amend somewhere, watch yourself. Watch which applications you jump between. Don't just make your changes, pay attention to how you do them. Are you jumping between text editor and FTP client? Text editor and web browser? FTP and Subversion? Just take a few minutes to think about which steps you might be able to miss out. For instance, if you use Textmate and Transmit, you can set up DockSend so that pressing ctrl-shift-f then 2 will upload the file you currently have open to the same place on the server. You can now change the editor↔FTP↔browser cycle to editor↔browser.

However...

Seamless does not imply flawless. Don't be tempted to simplify to the stage where you don't need any interaction between making a change and the change being live. If you rely on the fact that your changes 'just happen', you might be tempted not to check. That's the point at which they don't 'just happen'.

Another game concept prototype – Sine

Honestly, I have no idea what I was going for with this one. It started off last weekend with a vague idea about matching patterns of numbers and old-school graphics and I don't know what and ended up with this.

The idea is to make the bottom row match the top row, basically. There are several front-ends to this game so you can choose the style of play you prefer - numbers and letters, waves, colours or a generated sound wave (if you have a shiny new-fangled browser). It uses the nifty little Riffwave library to generate PCM data and push it into an audio element.

Further development

If I were to develop this further, I'd try and build it in a modular fashion so that front-ends could be generated really easily and open it to other people to see how many different ways this game could be played. It'd be an interesting social experiment to be able to play what is fundamentally the same game in a dozen different ways. You could find out if visual thinkers processed the information faster than numerical or audio-focused people. Leaderboards could allow different styles of player to compete on the same playing field but with a different ball (hmm, weak sports analogy). The rhythms of the game lend themselves well to generated drum tracks so there's probably something in that area for exploring as well.

At the moment, the code is written as the programming equivalent of stream-of-consciousness – global variables everywhere, some camel-case, some underscored, vague comments sprinkled around. There's some commented-out code for the wave mode that moves the waves closer together so that there's a time-limit set but I felt it didn't suit the game.

Many years ago during the text-editor holy wars, I sided neither with the Vi Ninjas nor the Emacs Samurai but instead went a third way – Pico (short for Pine Composer). It was the text editing part of the e-mail program I used (Pine). For many years, this served me well. Even today, Pico's successor - Nano – is installed pretty much everywhere. It isn't , however, quite powerful enough for fast-paced web development. Serious, full-time development needs shortcuts and macros, syntax highlighting and snippets. When you spend 10 or more hours every day pressing buttons to change flashing lights, you need to optimise the way the lights flash.

After Pico, I found Crimson Editor which served me well for almost 10 years. I eventually started working on a Mac and became a TextMate user for most of the last 5 years.

In my new job, I find myself jumping from computer to computer to desktop to server quite a lot. The only constant editor available is Vi. Or Vim (Vi Improved). I've been trying to pick it up as a way to ensure I can always jump into a friendly text editor no matter where I am. Besides, these days Vim is the old-new-cool thing that all the cool-old-kids use, particularly MacVim so I thought it was worth giving it a go to see what the fuss was about.

One of the biggest deciding factors in trying it out was actually fellow Edinburgh Web Dev/International Traveller Drew Neil (@nelstrom), creator and voice of the vimcasts.org series of screencasts who is actually writing a book on Vim this very second as I write this. Most people are evangelical about their choice of text editor to the point of rabid fundamentalist, frothing-at-the-mouth, intoning-keyboard-shortcuts craziness (hence my allusions to text-editor holy wars). When I mentioned to Drew that I used Pico instead, his response was long the lines of "Fair enough". This lack of confrontation actually inspired me to try it out. Well played, sir.

Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens. If you're interested, I recommend reading Yehuda Katz' post 'Everyone Who Tried to Convince Me to use Vim was Wrong'. Don't worry, I'm definitely not going to try and convince anyone to use one code editor over another. You should probably stop using FrontPage, though.

I recently ran into an interesting SEO problem on a project which has led to a question I just don't know the answer to:

How do you display syndicated content without triggering Google's duplicate content flag?

Hmm... intriguing.

Background

To explain the problem more fully (without giving out any project specifics), imagine you have a website. You probably already do so that shouldn't be hard. Now, imagine you fill that website full of original content. Again, that shouldn't be hard. For the sake of example, let's assume you run a news blog where you comment on the important stories of the day.

Next, you figure that your readers also want to read important related facts about the news story. Associated Press (AP) syndicates its content and through the API, you can pull in independently-checked related facts about whatever your original content deals with. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, a thousand other news blogs also pull in the same AP content alongside their original (and some not-so-original) content. Now, when the Googlebot crawls your site, it finds the same content there as it does in a thousand other places. Suddenly, you're marked with a 'duplicate content' black flag and all the lovely google juice you got from writing original articles has been taken away. Boo.

Your first thought might be to reach for the rel="canonical" attribute but that really only applies to entire pages. We need something that only affects a portion of the page.

Solution

What you need to do is find a way to include the content in your page when a visitor views it (providing extra value for readers) but prevent Google from reading it (hurting your search ranking). Fortunately, there are some methods for doing this. One involves having the content in an external JS file which is listed in your robots.txt to prevent Google from reading it. Another similar method involves having the content in an external HTML and including it as an iframe, again, preventing crawling via robots.txt. When the reader visits the page, the content is there, when Google visits, it isn't.

The Problem with the Solution

Both of the techniques mentioned here involve an extra HTTP request. You are including an external file so the visitor's browser has to go to your server, grab the file and include it. This isn't a huge problem for most sites but when you're dealing with high-traffic, highly-optimised websites, every file transferred counts. You go to all the trouble of turning all background images into sprites, why waste extra unnecessary connections on content?

Yahoo's Solution

Yahoo have a nice solution to this problem. If you include the attribute class="robots-nocontent" on any element, the Yahoo spider (called 'slurp') will ignore the content. Perfect. This does, however, only work for Yahoo. Not perfect.

My solution

My attempt at solving this problem which is a combination of SEO and high front-end performance was inspired by the technique GMail uses to deliver JS to mobile devices. In their article, Google delivers JS that they don't want run immediately in the initial payload. They figure that the cost of serving a single slightly larger HTTP request is less than the delay in retrieving data on demand.

I use HTML embedded in a JS comment in the original page which is then processed on DOMReady to strip out the comments and inject it into wherever it is supposed to be (identified by the data-destination attribute). I'm doing this on a page which already loads jQuery so this can all be accomplished with a simple bit of code.

<script type="text/html" class="norobot" data-destination=".content-destination">
 /*!
  <p>This content is hidden on load but displayed afterwards using javascript.</p>
 */
</script>
<div class="content-destination"></div>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
 $('.norobot').each(function() {
  _this = $(this);
  $(_this.data('destination')).html(_this.html().replace('/*!','').replace('*/',''));
 });
</script>

Notes on the code

You may have noticed the type="text/html" attribute on the script block. That's to get around the fact that jQuery parses and executes any script blocks it finds when moving elements around (in an appendTo() or an html(), for example. Adding this attribute tells jQuery to process this as template code.

Also, the opening JS comment here begins /*!. The exclamation mark in this is a directive to any minifiers you might use on the code to tell them not to remove this comment block.

This is also available in a standalone page.

This is all a very long setup for my initial question. Does Google read this and, if so, does this affect duplicate content rankings?

Plus and Minus

• Minus: The duplicate content is definitely in the page.
• Plus: It's hidden in JavaScript
• Minus: we're using JavaScript to serve different content to users and to google.
• Plus: we're showing less to google than users. Spam techniques show more to increase keyword matches.
• Plus: faster response due to a single http request (Google likes fast pages)

Obviously, we could add an extra step of obfuscating the 'hidden' content by reversing it or encoding it. This would definitely hide it from google and it would be trivial to undo the process before showing it to the user but is this step necessary? Part of my reasoning for concluding that Google ignores JS comments is that thousands of sites include the same standard licences bundled with their JS library of choice and don't get penalised. This may, of course, be specific to licences, though.

I can find no definitive answer anywhere on this subject. If you have any good references, please let me know. Alternatively, if you happen to know Matt Cutts, ask him for me. If I get any conclusive answer, I'll update here.