:: TheOneAndTheOnly.com – Andrew Buckman ::

My girlfriend, the darling over at Spleen Chronicles, was lamenting the lack of line styles in Illustrator today, specifically the ability to put a double-line stroke on a path.  I being a big fat cheater, gave her a way to get the effect she was looking for at the expense of the inside area between the two lines not being transparent.  After the break you’ll find my walkthrough for the double-line stroke, screenshots are from Illustrator CS4, but it is possible to achieve the same effect in CS3 and perhaps earlier.
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Google recently announced support for a new meta tag to designate canonical URLs as an alternative to using 301 Permanent Redirects. For those unaware, a canonical URL is the primary URL you want your content indexed as, often times duplicate content can be found on multiple URLs, especially when using a CMS or eCommerce platform. If a product exists in multiple categories, there may be multiple URLs for that product, all with virtually identical data. In certain situations, such as the product in multiple categories, a redirect to a canonical version may not be ideal, and in other situations, it may not be possible to set up appropriate redirects. For these circumstances, the new meta tag was created. The format for the new tag is as follows:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mystore.com/my-book/" />
You would place this in the header of all similar pages. As an example, http://www.mystore.com/books/my-book/ and http://www.mystore.com/authors/andrew/my-book/ should both include the meta tag. This should also help with the myriad of tracking variables that can show up on the end of URLs.

Notes
You can use the meta tag across subdomains, thus http://books.mystore.com/my-book/ can point back to http://www.mystore.com/my-book/, but you cannot use it across domains, so http://www.mybooks.com/my-book/ will not work.

Relative URLs are allowed, however I would strongly recommend specifying an absolute URL, the entire point of the meta tag is to specify a URL that is the definitive canonical version of a page, best to specify it absolutely to reduce the chance of errors.

The meta tag is supported by all the major search engines: Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and Ask.

For more details, see Google’s excellent writeup on specifying your canonical.

I was recently setting up a subdomain for a URL pointing at a shared IP.  The domain itself already had DNS set up for all subdomains to go to the IP, but nothing was being done with them on the server.  In a moment of curiosity, I checked out the subdomain’s URL before I set it up on the server and much to my dismay, it pulled up the primary website set up on that IP, a completely different domain than this subdomain was going on.  This is obviously not good because of duplicate content issues with the search engines, I certainly don’t want an entire copy of my site reachable on an unlimited number of subdomains on other domains.  To combat this, I’ve added an Apache Rewrite directive to my .htaccess file that rewrites anything not on the correct domain over to the proper one using a permanent redirect.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !theoneandtheonly\.com
RewriteRule .* http://www.theoneandtheonly.com/ [R=301,L]

Obviously, replace theoneandtheonly.com with your domain of choice.  Please be sure to put this after any other subdomain rewriting rules you might be using.  I don’t intentionally send subdomains to my main URL, if you do, you may need to tweak this a bit.  Also I opted to drop any path information on the rewritten URL, if you’d prefer passing that along, use the version below instead.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !theoneandtheonly\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.theoneandtheonly.com/$1 [R=301,L]

For the record, I encountered this problem on a server running Plesk 8.2.1, it may or may not be an issue under other setups.

Recently I ran across a Facebook page for a local company running a promotion to encourage people to become a fan.  The promotion involved awarding a prize to an unspecified number of people who were a fan on the ending date and asked that you forward the invite on to your friends and anyone else who might be interested in being a fan.  If it’s not obvious, the problem with the promotion is that there is a decided disincentive to me telling my friends about the page.  Why would I want to decrease my odds of winning the prize(s)?!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for giving away stuff to your loyal fans/subscribers, but when you’re just starting out and trying to encourage the viral spreading of your new marketing tool, a promotion that discourages people from inviting their friends probably isn’t what you’re looking to run.

Now to be fair, yes, it did work to get me to signup as a fan.  Did I tell anyone else about it?  No.  In fact I deleted the story from my news feed so it wouldn’t show up to my friends.  Are most people quite as bad as me on that?  Doubtful.  I’m anxious to see the promotion end to see if they follow it up with another promotion intended to spur the current fans to recruit their friends.  If that happens I’ll give them a free pass on this one hoping it was their strategy all along.

So they fired up the Large Hadron Collider today.  Apparently there was quite a buzz of people afraid they’d blow up the world starting it up.  One place in England was apparently even taking bets!

Meanwhile, William Hill celebrated Man’s continued existence. It had taken £119 from punters willing to bet that September 10 2008 would see the end of the world.

A spokesman said: “Our standard odds are 1,000,000/1, but anyone wanting longer or shorter odds is at liberty to take them. A number of customers took us up; on our offer and have bet that the world will end as a result of the Large Hadron Collider experiment.”

To anyone else I say, never fear, you haven’t missed your chance.  If the LHC experiment is going to cause the end of the world, it surely won’t be until they start colliding sub-atomic particles.  Today they merely let them race around the track.  There’s still time for you to bet it will end the world, and I too am willing to take your bet and let you name your odds.  Leave a comment with the amount you wish to bet and your desired odds and be sure to enter your email address when posting.  I’ll get back to you with my PayPal address for you to send your payment over.

source: Large Hadron Collider doesn’t cause the end of the world – yet