Dave Dash2010-08-29T14:12:50-07:00http://davedash.com/Dave Dashdd+atom1@davedash.comHave unique descriptive page titles2009-07-31T00:00:00-07:00http://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>
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<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&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><title></code> set to the site-wide default.</p>
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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>
Dynamically adjusting your page title in symfony2007-07-18T00:00:00-07:00http://davedash.com/2007/07/18/dynamically-adjusting-your-page-title-in-symfony<p>[tags]view, view.yml, symfony, reviewsby.us, title, seo[/tags]</p>
<p>A lot of the content on <a href="http://reviewsby.us/">reviewsBy.us</a> and other sites we make using <a href="http://symfony-project.com/">symfony</a> have dynamic content. We try to have our page titles reflect the content by prepending the name of the specific restaurant, document or menu item before the site name.</p>
<p>To do this we use a method called <code>prependTitle</code>. I define this in a file called <code>myActions.class.php</code> which almost all of my actions subclass in my projects. This way I can enhance all the actions simply by adjusting the common ancestor, <code>myActions</code>:</p>
<div><textarea name="code" class="php">
public function prependTitle($title)
{
$r = $this->getResponse();
$d = sfConfig::get('app_title_delimiter', ' « ');
$t = sfConfig::get('app_title');
$r->setTitle($title.$d.$t, false);
}
</textarea></div>
<p>The page title isn't stored anywhere, so we have to put it in <code>app.yml</code>:</p>
<pre><code>app:
title: reviewsby.us
</code></pre>
<p>Voila!</p>