Written by I found this sheet last night and have already made use of it. This PDF document lists all of the common WordPress functions and whilst it isn’t as comprehensive as it could be it is certainly a handy thing to have about when a function name is on the tip of your tongue!
Monthly archives for September, 2009
Webmasters – Clean out your links!
I was always under the impression that making sure that links on your site actually point somewhere is common sense, however it would appear that a lot of webmasters wouldn’t agree. Which I guess is a good thing because it gives me something to rant write about.
I was going through some sites today with an aim of link building, below is the method I use;
- I go to a site I already link with.
- I go to their links page.
- I open up every link on their page (using a handy Firefox plugin).
- I make sure I haven’t already got a link exchange with the site and that the site is relevant and good quality.
- I contact the webmaster and set up some form of exchange.
I know a lot of people don’t see the benefit of this old school way of linking sites, but I do and I would perform this function a lot. Which means I am privy to a lot of different links pages and forever opening up websites to look at.
Today I found a website that had 325 external links on it, it was a website that linked to me so I have a vested interest on what goes on in this links page, which is why I was really annoyed to find that 37 of those links pointed to dead sites, and by dead sites I mean literally no site there or the domain pointed to some generic holding page for some generic company not just sites with outdated content. That means a massive 11.4% of their links were completely useless.
Like I say, I have a vested interest in this page, because my link is on it and I want people to click on my link, and if it is hidden under sites that are going to be of no use to the user, well that is just poor form! I mean it annoys me enough that my site is lumped in with some site that hasn’t been updated in about 3 years and is of no use to man nor beast but when I am being pushed down by a completely dead URL, GAH!
What I normally do is email the webmaster and let them know which links I believe to be completely dead, and normally they get back to me thanking me and the links are removed but I just find it insane that you would need to be told this.
There are loads of excellent reasons for keeping your links up to date, here are some of them;
- At the end of the day they are a massive traffic leak, and if you can stem the flow of any traffic leaving your site, you will do that.
- Some of the links on your site will benefit you if people click on them (affiliate programs, toplist sites, etc etc) so the less links you have the more chance you have of someone clicking on one of those.
- You also get the added bonus that the user is being sent to sites with actual content on them, and you need to keep those guys happy if you want them to return to your site!
- I am unaware if there are any specific SEO implications involved in having a dead URL on your site, but I am sure google doesn’t look too kindly upon it.
Anyway, I am sure I am preaching to the converted here but this is my call to action.
Take 30 minutes, and go through the external links on your website and remove any dead wood. 30 minutes is all it takes and you will be improving your sites usability and improving the web. Then take 5 minutes and tweet/email/tell everyone you know who owns a website to do the same.
Can you imagine if every webmaster in the world did this? It would be fantastic. I mean this post is really only talking about websites that no longer exist, so Google wouldn’t be improved by it that much as it roots them out itself, but imagine if we all removed links to sites that hadn’t updated in the last 2 years and had no historical information of significance. The web would be so much cleaner, so much tidier, so much better!
</rant>
Acronym and Abbreviation Tags
I think these are two of the most under used tags in HTML, which is a shame because really quickly you can provide some excellent functionality and really help your users out with very little effort on your part.
So, what are they?
The Acronym tag or <acronym> to it’s friends is a tag that should encapsulate all acronyms used on your website. If you don’t know what an acronym is I would have to lol at you and pass you across to this website.
The Abbreviation tag, which has been nicely shortened (I see what they did there!) to <abbr> is a tag which should be used around any text that is an abbreviated form of a longer word. I can’t think of anything even slightly funny, so if you don’t know what an abbreviation is then go here.
w3.org have the following to say on the subject of acronyms and abbreviations.
The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to clearly indicate occurrences of abbreviations and acronyms. Western languages make extensive use of acronyms such as “GmbH”, “NATO”, and “F.B.I.”, as well as abbreviations like “M.”, “Inc.”, “et al.”, “etc.”. Both Chinese and Japanese use analogous abbreviation mechanisms, wherein a long name is referred to subsequently with a subset of the Han characters from the original occurrence. Marking up these constructs provides useful information to user agents and tools such as spell checkers, speech synthesizers, translation systems and search-engine indexers.
The content of the ABBR and ACRONYM elements specifies the abbreviated expression itself, as it would normally appear in running text. The title attribute of these elements may be used to provide the full or expanded form of the expression.
So now you know what they are and when they should be used, I guess I should write about why you should use them.
First off you would be scoring a really quick win as far as WCAG is concerned, checkpoint 4.2 to be exact.
Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym in a document where it first occurs. [Priority 3]
Secondly, it is semantic – You could argue that this is getting really pedantic in your markup, but it makes sense because the words we encapsulate with these tags are different from normal text.
My third and final point on why I think you should be using it is because it is useful to the end user, accessibility aside it is just nice to get a really quick definition of what an acronym on your site is.
In the past I have found a lot of websites that would use a fairly specific acronym to their area of interest and they would wrap an <a> around it and link off to wikipedia, when I think <acronym> along with the context the actual acronym is mentioned in would be more than enough for most users, and those that still don’t know – there is always google!
I guess it is time I actually mentioned how you use them, it is really straight forward.
<acronym title=”This is my Acronym”>TIMA</acronym>
<abbr title=”Personal Identification Number”>Pin</abbr>
That is it, easy eh?
I would like to know people’s opinions on this, but my thoughts are that you shouldn’t do too much extra styling to these elements other than what you would normally do to the text on your site. Let the browser handle it the way it wants to, which is normally with a dashed line underneath which I think is fairly universal and looks pretty nice.
Internet Explorer 8 Checkbox Issues
I think Internet Explorer 8 has improved upon Internet Explorer 7 in pretty much every way, everything just seems to run smoother on it and it supports things that Internet Explorer 7 wasn’t great at. It also helped to renew the importance of getting rid of Internet Explorer 6 and perhaps helped to drive a nail into the Internet Explorer 6 coffin.
However there is one thing that it has really taken a step back on and that is how checkboxes scale whenever you use the zoom tool in IE8. I say ‘how they scale’ but the issue is actually that they just don’t.
I have to admit this is something I normally wouldn’t be that worried about, I mean the scaling works grand in pretty much every other browser, and what users really scale sites anyway?
Visually impaired users, that’s who! And it was whilst working on a site specifically aimed at people with a visual impairment that this issue cropped up. All of the input fields scaled fine using a variety of in built and third party tools expect for checkboxes and radio buttons in Internet Explorer 8.
It was actually Dave Arthur from the Royal London Society for the Blind who came up with the solution, or more accurately came up with a link to the solution.
For those of you who don’t want to read it, basically the fix is to use CSS sprites with an image that has checkbox and radio button images on it, then you can apply these images to the offending elements, whenever the page scales now, the image scales up normally and no functionality is lost.
I have mentioned a post by Martin Ivanov before, and hopefully this second post will help persuade people that this man knows his stuff and that you should subscribe to his blog!
Microformat Cheat Sheets
Tonight, dear reader, I offer you links to not one, not two, but THREE Microformat cheat sheets.
Microformats are something I have always thought I should implement but for whatever reason have never actually gotten round to it. Having spent a couple of hours tonight looking into them in more detail I am convinced that including them in your web site is the right thing to do and I will be endeavouring to include them in all future projects and fit them in retroactively when I revisit old code.
Here are the links.
