Tom Lambert
Dissertator. Slacker.
Appointments by request

I wasn’t doing something quite that flippant. These cards are for my position has “Hiker in Chief” at Yosemite Explorer, so I didn’t care about a unique, custom, professional product. I was fine with the 30 or so free business card templates they offer. At every step, though, you’re tempted to upgrade: more templates, custom fonts, no ads on the back ($3.99 if you don’t want your cards to have the VistaPrint URL on the back, for example). Then of course you get offered all sorts of complementary (not complimentary) products: address labels, letterhead, pens and so on. Then when you’re all done and you’ve kept your exuberance in check and resisted ponying up for that killer premium font, you do have to pony up $5.68 for shipping and handling. That’s not really free, but it’s reasonable.

Watch out for the $10 cash back offer.

I was also hit up for a special offer for $10 cash back. This was the only part of the process that bothered me. It sounds great: spend $5.68, give your email address and get $10.00 back. Net gain: $4.32 plus 250 business cards. Who can beat that. If you take a minute to read all the small boring text on the left instead of just the main offer box where they ask for your email, you realize that by giving your email at this stage, you are in fact authorizing a $14.95 per month charge on your credit card.. I thought all the other come-ons were more or less what I expected and easy to pass on, but this one struck me as a bit deceptive. If you do the offer, I’d be curious what others think about that (leave a comment)

I haven’t tried to free t-shirt offer, but apparently you can get one of those too. In general I’m kind of picky about my t-shirts and I like to design my own from scratch so I passed on this one (again, if you try it, leave a comment please; I’d be curious about this one). So anyway, click on the banners below and you’ll get 250 “free” business cards for $5.68 or a “free” t-shirt (true cost undetermined). Best of all (from my point of view anyway), if you use that banner, I’ll actually get a commission!

So in a case that isn’t completely egregious, but gives an idea of the problem, it looks like this:

So in other words, you end up with the tooltips behind the taskbar. This bug has existed since Windows 95. The Microsoft solution is absurd: logout, restart, hope it improves (it doesn’t, or rather it does, until the next time). Other solution suggested: set it so that the taskbar does not always stay on top. Great idea, except that is even more annoying than the broken tool tips. I looked at a bunch of help forums and everyone agrees that there is no fix. Everyone, that is, but someone who posted in a comment somewhere, which led me to the Tooltip Fixer from Neosmart which immediately and simply fixes the hidden tooltip problem. And voilà!

I downloaded it, installed it and in three minutes it was fixed. It took me longer than that to make a small donation to his Chip-in fund. I only gave $5 (I’m a cheap bastard), but if everyone with this bug gave him $5 none of us would be poorer and he would be retired.

The Touchgraph search utility is a Java app that loads from their website and shows related pages and their degree of relatedness. This is not a link map, but more or less like the Google related pages concept. It’s pretty cool to give a visual sense of the weight of a given site and how Touchgraph thinks it fits in with the term or site you search on. The screenshot (click to enlarge) is a search on Yosemite National Park, because I’m an avid Yosemite Explorer as it were. What the screenshot doesn’t show is that there is also a sort of sidebar that lists all the related sites and gives you some info on those sites.

Quintura is a different deal. It shows the relationships between words. It is a fun idle pastime for linguists and perhaps for people who want to buy pay per click ads (i.e. Google AdWords and the like). Unlike Touchgraph, it’s a tool you download and run on your desktop.

Both of these are excellent time sponges for procrastinators and thus highly recommended. Actually, they’re more like novelties that you’ll play with for a while and discard. If you know of anything similar, please make a mention in the comments.

And normally that pooches out the bottom and would even overrun this text here, except that this paragraph has clear:both. That’s the normal, old fashioned way to do things. It works, but it’s inelegant and sometimes it doesn’t actually work that well.

Alternative Float Solutions

Sometimes, though, that’s an annoying solution and doesn’t really work. There are all kinds of hacks and what-not ranging from Shaun Inman’s absolute position and javascript solution to the clearfix:after solution. It’s giving me a headache, and the latter doesn’t work in the particular problem I encountered today where the containing element had a border, so forcing a clear is a problem and the Inman solution would work, but I really just didn’t want to add the javascript to the Wordpress theme I was fixing up (by the way, aside from that problem, it’s a nice theme called gardenz).

The Smarter, Better Way to Float

So then I stumbled on the slickest way to handle this. It’s an old method, but I had not seen it until recently and I just had to write it here not because it’s news, but so I wouldn’t forget it. It is described much better in the articles I mention in the credits, so if this doesn’t make sense in my disorganized sort of way, go there. Anyway, here it is: overflow: hidden a technique that dates back to at least 2005 and which, furthermore, appears to be based not on some hack, but on actually writing CSS the way the spec intended. The spec on height and ‘auto‘ (overflow being an attribute that effect height) states quite directly:

In addition, if the element has any floating descendants whose bottom margin edge is below the bottom, then the height is increased to include those edges.

That comes from a comment by Anne on the post over at 456 Berea. It’s so simple. You just apply this to the element that contains the floated element:

overflow:hidden;
height:1%;


Halleluja! Praise the Lord as only someone who has wasted countless hours on stupid float problems can praise something quite that geeky. Basically, it’s this simple, to take the example above.

A couple of notes: overflow is hidden so that you don’t get scroll bars in IE/Mac which always puts scroll bars in all cases. You need to set a height or a width to get it to work in IE and Opera. I’ve opted to set a height, since a percentage height is meaningless in most circumstances and doesn’t affect the rest of the layout. It’s probably more robust across browsers if you set a width of 100%, but this creates a problem if you are using a standard box model and you have margins, padding and borders.

And now this paragraph is not cleared, but it’s still safe! Hopefully anyway

Credit where credit is due

I basically figured out not one speck of this on my own. This came into the wide wide world through an article by Alex Walker drawing on Paul O’Brien’s wisdom. Further refinements have been offered by Peter-Paul Koch over at quirksmode.org (CSS - Clearing floats). It was also picked up by my old friend Mike Papageorge (Simple Clearing of Floats. Hey Mike - four years later and I finally have three pages up on that ski site I promised) and from there was found by the folks at 456 Berea Street (Simple Clearing of Floats).

1. I actually do pay for most of this stuff. Not much, but if somebody has a donation button, I pretty much always donate somewhere between $5 and $20. It’s the right thing to do.
2. As they say in the open source world, this is all free as in beer, but only some is free as in speech.

Everybody knows about browsers and email clients, so that stuff comes last. I’m trying to list some stuff that you might not know about, but which will (er.. may) improve your life. Then again it may not. I’ve arranged the list in increasing order of geekiness, so things like MySQL clients are way down the list. Also, I have not bothered to include things like Firefox, Thunderbird, Winamp and such that everyone knows about.

So here’s the list. It’s Windows-centric, though some apps are available for other platforms.

Desktop Timer

• Egg Timer. How can this top my list when it’s such a small app and not actually even free? Is it really my favorite almost-free software? It’s not, but I like it a lot and it runs constantly on my computer because of the particular way I use it: I set it to go off every 40 minutes and when it goes off, I do some pushups, pullups or ab exercises. I keep a set of Powerblock dumbells near my desk (someday I have to write about why these are the best adjustable dumbells), so sometimes I can do curls or flys as well. Sometimes I just get a cup of tea if I’m lazy. These exercises every forty minutes are great for the health of my back and my eyes. My wife just started using it to time her rehab exercises for her frozen shoulder throughout the day. After months of frustration and no progress, her range of motion has finally started increasing again . I used to use a program that I wrote called Drop 20 because it goes off every 20 minutes and says “Drop and Give Me Twenty!” but I didn’t make the timer adjustable and I found every twenty minutes was just too frequent. Disclaimer: Egg Timer is actually not free, but since it only costs $5 and you can try the full version for free, it’s a lot like free and think it justifiably belongs in this list, rather than a list of $$$ tools that I like. Maybe some day I’ll get back to Drop 20 and fix it up, because it’s funnier than Egg Timer. You can download Drop 20 for free, no spyware, no obligations (but my copyright!). Seriously, the one thing I do like better about my app besides the humor is that it runs from the system tray, rather than taking up all that space on the task bar.

Foreign Character Typing

• AllChars. This tool is fantastic. Literally. If you type in more than one language or regularly use characters that are not on the keyboard (en and em dashes, copyright symbols, things like that), this thing ROCKS! It can be customized with your own characters and snippets and also handles a variety of special characters — that em dash was typed in .03 seconds using CTRL+m+- … and so was that ellipse with a simple CTRL+3+. One thing that’s cool is that AllChars does not interfere with other control sequences because it is sequential. In other words, you type CTRL, release it, type “m” and release it, type “-” and release it. That actually makes it much faster than having to hold down the CTRL key (and if you type one-handed while eating, it’s easier too.

French Dictionary a.k.a. Dictionnaire française

• XMLittré. As the name implies, this is the famous Littré multi-volume French dictionary available for download to run on your desktop. A few years ago, it would cost you perhaps the equivalent of 1000 euros to own this. Now it’s free and, if you’re like me with a penchant for the old and literary, this is superior to more recent dictionaries in many respects. Note: this is not a French-English dictionary, it’s a French dictionary and it runs on the open source StarDict engine, which you must install.

Task Reminder

• TaskPrompt. I’ve tried some paid task managers and of course there’s always Outlook if you have Microsoft Office. I like this one. It has everything I want.

Email Backup

I like to keep my inbox clean and I get some big attachements, so my account fills up from time to time and I have to delete messages. But sometimes I wish I hadn’t. But how do you back up you accounts?

• IMAPSize - a tool to backup the mail in your IMAP folders. Does one thing. Does it well. Free. It actually does some other stuff, but that’s what I use it for.
• Mozbackup - to backup of Thunderbird mail (and all Mozilla stuff). Too bad I’m not using Thunderbird anymore because it was crashing literally every five minutes. Someday perhaps they’ll fix it up and it will work again for me.

Desktop Search

The dominant conceptual model for a computer is still the desktop and file cabinet metaphor. That metaphor was fine when you had all your files on a 720kb floppy (which is the computer the Apple engineers invented for). The problem is, that model is broken and I have grown tired of looking through eighteen levels hierarchical directories. In steps search.

• Copernic Desktop Search. It still indexes the broadest variety of file types and I still have a certain number of legazy WordPerfect files, though the new version annoyingly always wants to open my browser and take me to the web. If I wanted all that web integration, I would use Google Desktop search. I don’t really want the browser interface/internet integration. I want a desktop tool and Copernic allows all sorts of filters (file type, file name, and so forth). I’ve lost my love affair with Copernic.
• Windows Vista Integrated Search via the Start Bar. For 90% of what I need, I use this, but for more obscure searches and anything based on file content rather than file name, I still use Copernic. It’s one of the few things that Vista brought me, aside from the ability to run Adobe CS3 as I’ve already mentioned (see my post on WebmasterWorld—Vista: get ready for pain). Yes, I know, it’s not free unless you already have Vista. And if you don’t already have Vista, do not crossgrade (I don’t use the word upgrade unless I truly feel it’s essential).

Graphics and Image Management.

• Irfanview. Irfanview is a simple image viewer and allows for some simple manipulation (resize, convert to other formats, rotate, lossless rotation, rename, gamma adjustment and a few others). It’s not Photoshop, but more often than not it’s what I use. I particularly appreciate the ability to do lossless JPEG rotations in batch based on EXIF information. In other words, my camera attempts to add a note to the EXIF information in the JPEG file that tags it with the orientation of the camera when the picture was taken. I can just Select All in Irfanview thumbnail view and rotate all my images correctly in one go. I can also batch resize, add a little sharpening, and batch rename all my images. Unless I have an image that needs a lot of manipulation, I just don’t bother to fire up Photoshop.
• Exifer. This really fits the “Do one thing and do it well” definition. It didn’t used to be totally “free” in that it was a “postcardware” (i.e. you have to send the author a postcard). Now it’s unmaintained and no postcard required and, though five years old and the author says it’s not up to modern standards for speed and whatnot, it works just fine for me on Vista. Exifer allows you to edit EXIF info in your image files. One of the cool things it lets you do is sort images by the timestamp in the EXIF info, and then rename them with a sequential counter. So when my wife and I take pictures on different cameras, if the clocks in the cameras are synched up, it will sort them nicely even if you’ve changed the file creation timestamp. That sounds obscure, but it can be real handy.
• Iconico Color Picker. A really great color picker. Similar to the Whatcolor tool above—a little more sophisticated for picking colors, but without the color names for most colors.

Mapping and Hike Planning

• Google Earth. Nothing more fun when planning a hike. Has Yosemite Trails on it.

Search Tools

That’s for another article as there are a zillion search tools, but just to throw one out:

• Quintura Search maps your search as a sort of linguistic web. I’m sure there’s a practical usage for it, but I enjoy it’s entertainment value.

Zip Utility

• IZARC. I’ve tried so many of these over the years. Got sick of paying for them, but was disappointed with the free versions until I found this one. It is much faster than the other free utility I used to use, is much more stable with Vista, and can handle almost every format.

FTP Client

• Filezilla is excellent and, in fact, also has a free FTP server as well, but I’ve never had a need. As good or better than any free or paid tool I’ve used.

Registry Cleaners and System Cleanup Tools

These might scare you a bit, but I’ve never had a problem. I have over the years had various paid ones and don’t see any real advantage — none of them really get everything and these are a lot less bloated.

• Eusing Free Registry Cleaner. Does one thing and does it pretty well.
• CCleaner - a registry cleanup and file system cleanup tool. So it does two things. It doesn’t matter which of these you run first, the other will find some remaining junk. Run them both. Watch the options on CCleaner and make sure you set it as you want.
• Startup Inspector. Lets you get control of everything that loads into your computer at startup. Slowing down? You probably have all kinds of junk running in the background that you don’t even know about.

File Rename

• AF5 batch file renamer. Why would need a file renamer when you can just right click and rename? If you asked that, you don’t need one. If, however, you sometimes need to batch rename, perhaps even based on regular expresssions, then this can save you a lot of time. You can definitely download it, install, and then use it to rename 100 files a lot faster than you’ll ever do it using the Windows interface.

Simple Programming Editors

• HAPEdit. I use this when programming in PHP. Good syntax highlight, code suggestion, brace and parenthesis matching. Everything I need. I’ve tried a lot open source PHP IDEs and they’ve never really had much value to add, but did add a lot of bloat and instability. If you really want something better, you need to pony up $300 for the Zend Environment, which has kickbutt debugging. But this is a list of free tools and $300 ain’t free. Some people tell me they don’t need code suggestion because they know PHP well. My response is: I don’t need spell check, because I know Englsih rreally wlle… oops. It will save you a lot of bugs from typos.
• Notepad++ has a lot of the same features as HAPEdit, but does not have code suggestion. is a bit different. It’s a bit lighter, a more appropriate Notepad replacement, but not quite as feature-rich for PHP programming.

MySQL Desktop Client

• SQLYog. Wait, doesn’t MySQL come with a perfectly adequate command-line interface? Yes, it does, but so does SQLYog, but SQLYog aslo comes with a GUI table browser, and lots more. Awesome productivity tool. The free version doesn’t do HTTP Tunneling to let you connect to a remote server that has only the SSL port open, but for developing in your sandbox, the free version is awesome. By the way, you can also use PHPMyAdmin… if you really have to… but you will suffer. Not to knock it, but being browser-based, it is just not anywhere near as fast and versatile as SQLYog (though it will work on a remote server).

Testbed Server Sandbox

If you’re going to build websites, you really need to have a testbed server so that you can test your PHP scripts. It lets you test Wordpress, Drupal or what have you locally before showing your mistakes to the world or bringing your site down with a typo.

• WAMPServer — there are many packages to install a free server using Apache and MySQL and PHP. I used to install them all separately and you still can of course. I also used to use ApacheFriends until I went to Vista and it had problems. Now I use this one. They all get you to the same point but lately this one works best for me. The ApacheFriends package will also install PERL if you need that, and I don’t think WAMPServer does.

So I went hunting for Firefox extensions that would save me from this aggravation and found that you can strike back at these miscreant web developers using built-in settings in Firefox. Hooray!

First, let’s just stop this nonsense of letting other people decide how big my main browser window should be. They can still set windows to open at a certain size, but resizing an existing window will not work with this simple tip. In Firefox, in the top menu bar, go to Tools » Options.. » Content and click on the first Advanced button, not the Advanced tab or the second Advanced button in that panel (talk about good UI design).

Now you’re in the Advanced Javascript Settings window. Just uncheck them all. I don’t see any reason to let a script on a web page do anything for me. If I really need to resize my window, for example, I’ll do it myself thank you very much.

Now we come to the case, though, where the developer has not created a resizable popup window, so I can’t resize it and, as often as not, can’t use that page at all. Nice design buddy. But, again, Firefox comes to the rescue. Up on the address bar (i.e. where you normally type http://raisedbyturtles.com, or would if you didn’t already get updates via the RSS feed or email), you enter the Firefox configuration screen by entering about:config and hitting the enter key (in other words, no http or anything like that, just about:config). This will bring up thousands of options. To pare down the list to what we want, down where it says “Filter” type in dom.disable_window_open_feature. Now you have a list of just the features you want. Double-click on any line to toggle that feature between true and false.

You can have your pick of which options you want to change and which you don’t. This is working pretty well for me:

You can see a full write-up on those features on the Firefox tips page, but these are the ones we care about:

dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are resizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable

Set this to true to make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar

Set this to true to always display the menu in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.location

Set this to true to always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows.

dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars

Set this to true to prevent sites from disabling scrollbars.

Enjoy better surfing without those annoyances!

This means that you effectively have duplicate content, that is identical content that appears on multiple URLs. In a bad case, this will get some semi-random URL listed in the search engine instead of the one canonical (that is “authoritative, recognized, accepted”) URL that you want the search engines to use to get to that specific page on your site. It might also list both your preferred canonical URL and one or more of the others. That sounds good, because you could just take over the Google listings with your ten different URLs for your page of elephant jokes, but the problem is that it will split the power of those pages (call this Page Rank if you want). This might be even worse than listing the wrong page, because rather than one page in the top-10 in Google, you’ll have a page back at number 50 and another back at number 75 and so on. Nobody reads those pages. Why? Because you’ve ended up dividing up your inbound links and confusing the search engine robot. It’s just a robot—don’t make it think too hard!

For example, let’s say you just wrote a post on The Big Bad List of Elephant Jokes and you assign it a post slug of “elephant-jokes” and you put it in the categories “elephants” and “jokes” and you tag it as “humor”. You write it in June of 2020. This means that Goohoo! finds it at

• http://raisedbyturtles.org/ (b/c it shows up on the home page as the most recent post)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/elephants (b/c it’s the most recent post in that category)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/jokes (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/tag/funny (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/archives/2020/06/ (because it’s at the top of your June 2020 archives)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes (because this is the actual URL).

You don’t really want to do this. You want one canonical URL that reaches any given chunk of content. It’s better for you, your visitors and the search engines. So basically, you want to only index the “real”, that is canonical, URL.

Sorting the Canonical URL and Duplicate Content Issues

How do you do that? You could disallow the search engines from your archive and category pages using a robots.txt file. This will work, but the problem is that if you don’t get crawled before a post gets pushed off your home page, you might never get that post indexed (unless you generate a sitemap perhaps).

So what do you do? Simple, you install the incredible Headspace2 plugin. I used to use and recommend a hacked combination of the SEO Title Tag plugin and the All-in-one SEO Pack. That’s a powerful combo too, but not as powerful as Headspace2 and they need a minor hack (actually just a manual database change) to work together. I don’t say Headspace2 is incredible lightly, but this is just a great idea that is well-executed.

I got a fatal error when I installed H2, version 3.3.16, but that’s because the headpsace/plugins.php file needed to be executable by “owner” and I had the wrong file permissions on it. You can change that simply from your FTP client (try Filezilla if you don’t have an FTP client). If you’ve been using AIOSP, by the way, you can import all your data via the Headspace2 options.

Once you install this plugin (installs like any WP plugin; instructions in the readme file that comes with the download), you need to go in and enable some modules. This is a complex and powerful plugin and not all of it is enabled by default.

• From your Wordpress admin area, go to Options » Headspace2 » Modules
• Look over at the “Disabled” list. Drag and drop any of these modules into the “Simple” section. I have the following activated currently:
  • No Index/No Follow — essential for sorting the duplicate content issue
  • Page Title — essential for the second part of this how-to.
  • Page Description — Let’s you create a custom meta description, which will get to in a second.
  • More Text — Instead of a generic “Read more” for a continued article, you can customize the text so it’s something like “Read more about sorting out duplicate content…”
  • Tags — lets you tag your pages and puts these tags in your meta keywords.
• Now that you have the modules enabled, you’ll be able to control the indexing of all your pages. At edit or creation time, you can keep a single page out of the search indexes, which is useful for things like Contact pages and things like that. More importantly, though, we’ll get rid of all those category and archive pages and make them more or less invisible to the search engines.
  • Go back to the Headspace2 “Page Settings”. You should see a list that includes:
    • Archives
    • Categories
    • Search Pages
    • Tag Pages
  • For each of those listed above (not all the ones listed by Headspace2), click on it and, at the bottom of the options, you can see two check boxes. Check the No Index box, but not the No Follow box. Save. This tells the search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc) that it shouldn’t even bother to keep a record of the content of that page, but that it should follow those links on through to the actual pages you want indexed. If you check the No Follow box, you would prevent the search engine from even finding those pages that you really want indexed.
  • Note that you can also edit the page title and other information for those pages. We won’t bother right now, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you want to customize any of this.

Sorting out Meta Titles

H2 has another great utility: it lets you set unique meta titles (that’s the one that appears in the upper browser title bar, not the one the reader sees on the page) that are different from your H1 heading title. You can also craft meta descriptions and meta keywords and, in fact, any meta information. It will add additional text entry boxes that let you set your keywords, description and title on the post edit/creation screen.

The meta title is really key and the only one that really really really matters. This is what appears in the big bold text in the search results. This is the first thing about your page that most people will see. You want to make it count and you don’t want to simply duplicate what you have for the post heading. Above all, under no circumstances should the average blogger have a site where the meta title looks like this: My Site Name | Name of My Post. Nobody cares about the name of your stupid site and it’s also not descriptive in the least if you have a name like mine. It makes your titles look less unique and harder to tell apart if your visitor has several pages of your site open in different browser tabs or windows.

Why would you want your meta title to be different from your post title? Well, Google’s top search quality engineer, Matt Cutts, pointed out in his Wordpress SEO video that varying these two gives you two chances to match terms. You can use subtly different wording, looking to use alternate spelling (changes and changing in Matt’s example) or related terms (photos and pictures and images for example).

This is actually not why I do it, though.The meta title appears in the search results, so it needs to give the user some information scent. There’s only so much room to be clever. However, in your RSS feed or on page, where you’ve already got the users there, you might want to just give them something funny or clever, but perhaps that does not make the general idea of the article immediately obvious. In many cases, such as a how-to article like this, my two titles might be similar. But when I write some humor or political commentary, I might want to have an H1 heading that is engaging, but not necessarily descriptive in the same way the meta title is.

Meta Title

Longer, more descriptive title that should say: “I answer your question. I am the page that you’re looking for. Come look at me.”

H1 Heading Title

Might be even longer (on this page I’ve added the “Wordpress Setup Part 2″) or very short. It might be pithy, ironic or a mystery whose real meaning is only revealed as the reader goes down the page. The user is on the page already and has a view of the text that follows. The H1 text should say “Read on! I’m funny. I’m interesting. I’m good for a laugh or a solution.” It’s not necessarily a summary.

What if I already have pages without unique titles?

So now if you’ve never written a post and you don’t want to set titles for categories, you’re all set, but what if you are trying to fix up an old site, or you want to attach titles to category pages? Simple. Just leave the Options panel and head on over to Manage » Meta-data. You’ll see that H2 gives you a list with the Post Title (what appears on the page) fixed and the Page Title (what appears in the browser bar) editable. Now, look at the upper right corner of the screen. Headspace lets you mass edit almost everything—page title, post-slug, custom “more” text and everything. This is an amazing management tool.

Other Meta Tags

Meta Keywords

Who cares about these? The search enignes don’t pay attention anymore, so it’s just a waste of bandwidth, right? Perhaps, but things change and you may someday find these useful for your own internal search algorithms or what have you. I do this for my benefit, not the search engines. I write my title first, which keeps me on topic. I write keywords last, to see how I did. But of course you can ignore it. Since you’re using Headspace, you just generate your tags, which have uses for helping your visitors find related posts and so forth, and these will become meta keywords, so why not (if it’s not worth being a tag, I don’t bother to add extras).

Meta Description

Search engines don’t use this either, right? Probably not for ranking (how high you are in the results), but they might use it for relevance (trying to figure out the actual content of your post, assuming the description matches the rest of the page). More importantly, the will use it for the snippet that appears in the search results in some cases. An example would be where the algorithm tells the engine that your page is on elephant jokes, but it doesn’t find the word on the page so it can’t find a relevant snippet. What does it use? If you have no meta description, it might use nothing or it might just start grabbing your navigation text (I’ve had that happen on image pages). If you have the description, you control what appears in these cases instead of depending on SE magic.

Recap

By using Headspace2, you save yourself tons of headaches, lots of theme-hacking, and make your site more usable for visitors and search engines alike. If done right, your duplicate content issues and duplicate title issues will be totally resolved.

The Problem with the default Wordpress URLs

By default, every page in Wordpress will have a URL like http://site.com/?pid=31. What you want is a URL like http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes for your collection of Elephant Jokes because of course there is nothing funnier than elephant jokes and nobody who sees that URL will be able to resist the urge to click it. Nobody. Some Wordpress user add additional parameters (and I did so in the past), so that it looks like http://site.com/2020/06/07/elephant-jokes if it’s posted on June 7, 2020 (I predict a resurgence in the popularity of elephant jokes in the 2020s). That’s fine, but there is a drawback in that you probably don’t want people navigating back up to http://site.com/2020/06 by editing your URL because that URL may be a dead end or, at best, list the articles published on that date. So Google’s top “search quality” engineer, Matt Cutts, suggests simply using the post name. If you will have a carefully categorized, hierarchical site, where posts will typically belong to just one category, it may make sense to have the category in the URL (again, more information for your visitors and in your search results). Otherwise, probably not.

Why Change Your URL Schema?

Some people call these type of URLs “search-engine friendly” but in reality, the search engines can handle a URL in the default form just fine. However, this method lets you achieve a few things:

• You give keywords and context to the search engines (SEs). This isn’t going to automatically rocket you to the top, but it will help the SEs a lot in determining what the main point of the page is. I’m not smart enough to game the search engines and I also believe that long-term, it will just become harder and harder anyway. That said, like any writing, you don’t want to make it purposely difficult for the reader. So you use this to give one of your “readers”, aka Googlebot or the Yahoo! Slurp or the MSN engine, a little help in understanding your message.
• You give keywords and context to your users. I often look at a URL before I click on a link. I use this information all the time and appreciate a well-chosen URL, whether displayed at the bottom of my browser or in search results. However, where this really helps your potiential audience is in the case where someone does something like paste a URL into an email or forum. Which of the following is more useful to you as a reader:
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this - http://example.com/?p=34″
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this - http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes“

  Definitely the second one. It saves you time—if you don’t want to read elephant jokes (and why would you so hate elephants?), you don’t waste your time clicking.

• Easier to remember and to give out verbally.

How do your Change Your Default URL Schema in Wordpress?

This is very simple. In your WP admin area, go to Options » Permalinks and choose Custom. Now for your custom structure, you can enter in the text box:

• /%postname%/ — This is the Matt Cutts style.
• /%category%/%postname%/ — This is my preferred style for a site that is meaningfully hierarchical and categorized (i.e. if you expect people to use drill-down navigation).
• /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ — use this if you really don’t want any duplicate paths, but realistically all you need to do is add a number at the end of the post slug and you’ll get the same effect.

By default, Wordpress will just use your-very-long-post-title-with-little-words-included. Sometimes that’s okay, depending on the title, but as a general rule, write custom post-slug on every post. The other important thing to remember here is to write a custom post-slug on every post. In the post edit/creation area, there’s a box on the right called post-slug that determines the last element of your URL. By the way, if you don’t already, write a custom post-slug on every post. Did I mention that already?

Recap

Wordpress gives you a nice facility for creating intelligent and readable URLs for your site. Taking a bit of time to restructure the default URL and to write useful post-slugs on every post will be beneficial to your readers, will attract more readers and will help the search engines determine the focus of your page.

Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill wearing dark glasses?
A. Nothing. He didn’t recognize them.

Q. Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?
A. Their pink tennis shoes are too tight.

Q. Why do elephants have flat feet?
A. From jumping out of trees.

Q. How do you spot an elephant up in a tree?
A. Look for their pink tennis shoes.

Unresolved Conspiracy Theory Question: why are there no elephants in the space program?

Why elephant jokes? Because I’ll be using this as a fun way illustrate a number of things in my upcoming series on setting up Wordpress and doing some basic search engine optimization.

By the way, these all came from a book I had as a kid. I lost the book 30 years ago, shortly before I lost my mind. These jokes are all that remain of either the book or my mind from that period. Of the two, I would really prefer to find the book.

I find no evidence that Safari requires Quicktime to run. In fact, the most relevant page I find at Apple suggests that Quicktime is more likely to render to Safari unstable and is only needed to display streaming media (and I get by just fine without it in Firefox). Maybe I’m just wrong about this and Safari simply cannot and will not run without Quicktime, but frankly, I don’t care.

And why should Apple care? Because Apple is a company that often “gets it”. They understand how to be customer-centric, hip, cool, friendly. Somehow, while Windows ran on a completely open architecture and Apple OSes ran only on proprietary equipment, Apple managed to gleen all the good warm fuzzies while MS was vilified. In other words, Apple excels at reputation management, guerrilla marketing and all that stuff. Think different.

What better way to get a Windows user away from Windows than to offer up for free a killer browser with the implied hint that if you like the browser, you should see it integrated into an entire OS. What worse way to get me to switch than to do like MS always does, treating me like they know better and they’ll set it up for me. Please, think different.

So thank you Apple for making a windows version of Safari available. I appreciate it. Really. I just don’t plan to ever install it as long as it’s a two-fer with Safari and Quicktime. I know you think you’re helping me out, but I don’t need help really. I just want to try a new browser.

So I eventually found out that you need to download a special program to clean up the detritus left by CS3. So first

• Go get the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (scroll down that page for the actual download link).
• Then get the AdobeCS3Clean Script. In theory this utility is for cleaning up the beta distro to install the full package, but it cleaned tons of stuff off my system. Run it a couple of times until it doesn’t seem to do anything more.

This is a simple non-GUI tool that runs in a shell window. In theory, based on the options given, there are two levels on this cleanup utility, but in fact, there are four. I found out about this from CrucialLimit.com blog post on running the CS3 cleanup script and he got it from Adobe support. Dave (CrucialLimit) ran at level 3. I tried that and some stuff was left, so I thought, “Well, everything is hosed, might as well go nuclear” so I ran it at level 4.

Annoyingly, the Version Cue service was still running. Get rid of that damn it! Frankly, I did not want to just disable it, I wanted to kill it forever.You can do this by editing the registry, but (full disclosure), I think that’s how I got to the sorry state I’m in, though I did do a system backup and restore, so in theory my registry is back where it was before I mucked with it. Anyway, it turns out this is absolutely simple. So often, Windows is like Linux, only you just don’t know it, which is to say that there are command tools for everything if you know where to look. In this case, it’s a simple little tool named “sc.exe”. Simple

• Open a command prompt
• type sc delete “Adobe Version Cue CS3″ and the nasty virus, er Version Cue, is finally gone. Note the quotes. Without them, you’ll get an error.

Now you’re almost done. If you want to try to get rid of as much Registry detritus as possible, download the Eusing Free Registry Cleaner. I’ve run it many times without it every causing any problems. I’m not sure it’s ever truly fixed anything either, but it does delete tons of registry keys with no seeming ill effects. In this case, it finds tons of Adob-related keys left over. Make sure to run it twice and to check that you have the latest version.

Finally, believe or not, you might still have some stuff left over and CCleaner is another registry cleanup and repair tool (choose “Issues”) and also does disk cleanup and handles uninstall functios using other option. A pretty handy little tool and also free.

So now you should have

• most CS3 files removed
• CS3 services totally uninstalled
• most registry keys deleted
• weird file assocation issues fixed.

So were pretty much at a clean slate. Restart and see if you can install!

Originally, I bought this domain with the idea of encouraging kids to write their fictional biographies—that is the biography of who they wished they were. Now it doesn’t seem like there’s any need for such a thing since they can post their writings on Facebook, Myspace, Blogger or whatever. So “raised by turtles” was supposed to be the tag line of my biography. I wasn’t raised by wolves. I was raised by turtles and as a result, I’m slow to get anything done, but I can hold my breath for a long time.

You know how they say you should find a focussed blog topic and stick to it? It’s possible that the fake-biography–fiction-history-memorials-wordpress–drupal niche is a little poorly defined, but it’s more about having a place to put my notes down, not about becoming the next inspiring celebrity hero like… um… Carrot Top. Yeah, I’m not shooting to be the next Carrot Top or anything, just putting down thoughts.

Update: well, as you can see, it will only go back as far as December 31, 1969. So the historian who wants to create a blog where the posts are dated according to the even being discussed is out of luck.