At WDL we’re loving Googles link rel=canonical at the moment. It’s long been a problem with Google (and any other search engine) that a single page on a website can be seen as many separate pages:

http://www.websitedesign.co.uk
http://www.websitedesign.co.uk/index.php
http://websitedesign.co.uk
http://websitedesign.co.uk/index.php

and so on will all resolve to a single page, yet Google will see each as an individual resource. This can be a problem for a number of reasons. First is that Google will make an arbirtary decision about which one of these will be the ‘main’ page for it’s index which may not agree with your choice, and second, that the power of your incoming links can be dissipated if sites linking to use use different URL’s.

Google has addressed this problem by asking webmasters to add this tag to the head section their pages:

This link tells Google that http://www.websitedesign.co.uk should be considered the ‘main’ URL for all of the URL’s that resolve to the home page of our site. Now, with the canonical link in place, all the links that point to our home page will boost the link popularity for the single URL http://www.websitedesign.co.uk.

For full information about canonical, check ou this page on Google Webmaster Help.

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If you own any domain names, then look out for this scam.
I received an email offering to buy a domain I own:

Dear Sir,
we are interested to buy your domain name TENDRING.INFO and offer 65% of the appraised market value.
As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
pddomains.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Domain Resale

The email is a scam run by the cheapest of the three appraisal companies. Ignore it!!

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With the release of firefox 3 you be wondering wheter you can run both versions of firefox at the same time, well some people will tell you you cant but you can.

It all boils down to 2 things, the profile manager and the shortcuts.

This post assumes that you know how to use the advanced installtion of firefox and have firefox version 2 in one folder and firefox version 3 in another (in my case “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2″ and “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3″)

Start by making 2 different profiles in the profile manager, to do this make sure firefox is closed and its not running in the background.

Run the profile manager by running the following command…

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -profilemanager

Remember to change the Firefox directory to where you have installed firefox.

Within the profile manager make a new profile call it whatever you want. In my case just for ease i have called them Firefox2 and Firefox3.

Now I’m not sure if the following shortcut syntax works with Firefox3, but I add it just to keep consistency.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2\firefox.exe” -P Firefox2 -no-remote

As with before make sure you change the directory to where you installed your version, and do the same on the firefox3 shortcut but change the profile name.

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\firefox.exe” -P Firefox3 -no-remote

And viola, you can run two versions of FireFox along with your 3rd favourite browser.

As a quick sidenote if you want both firefoxes to have the same bookmarks, history, etc… just copy the contents of the orignal default folder to the new profile you’ve made.

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

The default folder should read something like…

4scygde1.default

Just copy the contents of that folder into your new profile folder.

And yes, I run three screens simultaneously.

browsers, cheat, Design, Firefox, internet, syntax, website Hide