2012-01-17T21:54:19-08:00 http://davedash.com/ Dave Dash dd+atom1@davedash.com 2009-07-31T00:00:00-07:00 http://davedash.com/2009/07/31/have-unique-descriptive-page-titles <div style="float:right"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124375866@N01/3764074726" title="View 'Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine - (Build 20090715083437)' on Flickr.com"><div style="text-align:center;"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3588/3764074726_0c02ffd18c.jpg" alt="Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine - (Build 20090715083437)" border="0" width="483" height="338" /></div></a> </div> <p>One of my internet pet-peeves is people using the same page title for every page on their web site. Take a look at <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=+site:www.sphinxsearch.com+sphinx+api+php">this search for Sphinx</a>. As you can see virtually all the links for Sphinx are titled "Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine" which blows for usability when it comes to searching, or even managing the various pages you might have open in your web browser.</p> <p>To get an idea of the page I want I need to look at the abstract which may or may not give me a clue. Even the forum posts which usually have subjects, have their <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> set to the site-wide default.</p> <!--more--> <p>The first step in solving this, is identifying you have a problem in the first place. So I wrote <a href="http://github.com/davedash/Title-Variance/tree">a tool</a> in python to determine how unique the page titles you have are:</p> <pre><code>% python measure.py sphinxsearch.com 1050 titles found for sphinxsearch.com 483 unique titles found for sphinxsearch.com 46% of the pages on sphinxsearch.com have unique titles </code></pre> <p>This is fairly telling. It means over half the pages on sphinxsearch.com have a generic title.</p> <p>This site faired a bit better:</p> <pre><code>% python measure.py spindrop.us 988 titles found for spindrop.us 822 unique titles found for spindrop.us 83% of the pages on spindrop.us have unique titles </code></pre> <p>So please, think about people trying to use the information on your site. Design your templates in such a way that you can come up with unique titles.</p> <p>Feel free to expand on this tool, it could easily output the offending pages or titles.</p> 2009-07-01T00:00:00-07:00 http://davedash.com/2009/07/01/list-of-comprehensive-international-dialing-codes <p>I get bored with mundane tasks. So I create little adventures for myself. I had to create a list of countries and country codes to use on the <a href="http://mozilla.com/mobile">Firefox mobile home page</a>. The first few lists were incomplete, so I made my own by parsing a list provided by the International Telecommunication Union. I stripped it down to simple forms of the country names and removed codes that are very rare (satellite phones).</p> <p>Well this could be a boring task for most people, so I placed it on [github][http://github.com/davedash/International-Dialing-Codes/]. Feel free to use this in your own projects, I even include a perl one-liner in the README to convert this into a drop down HTML list.</p>