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For those of you who have your own blog and include YouTube videos on it you will notice that YouTube decided to add a big, ugly YouTube search bar to the top of your embedded videos this morning. You’ll probably also notice that the embedded YouTube videos on my blog are sans ugly bar.

Here’s how you get rid of it:

&showsearch=0

Add that parameter to the end of the video URL when you are embedding it. Remember it shows up twice per embed.

If you are a standardista like myself, use &showsearch=0 instead.

Here’s some example code using YouTube’s default embed code:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&hl=en&showsearch=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Below is the standards compliant version, since we all know I haven’t just sailed on that ship, I’m the captain.

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" style="width:425px; height:344px;" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/i2wnwMfmolw&amp;showsearch=0" />
</object>

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks the new search bar is hella ugly.

I’ve been in several meetings over the past four months or so where the topic of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, has come up and people have asked me about it.

Buying search engine optimization services from a SEO firm is like buying an engine for your brand new car from your mechanic. The first question you should be asking is why didn’t the engine come with the damn car?

SEO firms don’t want you to know this but if your web design firm didn’t suck, you’d never have a need for SEO services.

Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN don’t exist to assign page rankings. They genuinely give no shits if the most “optimized” web site is number one, or number five-hundred. What they care about is being the absolute best resource for helping people find the information they were looking for.

When you’re picking out a prostitute you don’t pick the ugly one just because they have the best smelling perfume. How much money you pay some guy spouting buzzwords to “optimize” your web site is inconsequential.

Most SEO firms have a long list, of things they like to call tactics, for improving the frequency and quality of page rankings. This list of tactics changes all of the time. In the past it included such things as keyword density, meta tag optimization, reciprocal linking and writing useless copy on the web site itself designed to be parsed by search engine bots.

The problem with these old approaches is that they don’t help the search engine to provide the best results to users searching for information and that’s their core concern. So search engines change their formulas - often. In fact today sites which employ the tactics I mentioned above will be punished by almost all search engines.

Continue reading The Real Secret to SEO

I love WordPress because it is a free, easy to install, configure and use blog platform. It’s idiot-proof, especially if you’re using their free hosted service at WordPress.com. It is supported by an incredibly passionate community of people building plug-ins and themes to extend the scripts functionality and make it accessible to everyone.

I thought that WordPress was just about perfect until a few weeks ago when I was doing a routine XHTML validation of my site (yes I do it routinely). The site had errors. For a standardista like myself having the W3C validator tell you that you’ve got site errors is about as disconcerting as being told you have chlamydia.

I found two problems, the first stemmed from the relatively new Gallery feature’s use of inline style sheets. Inline style sheets can only be used within the document head. Use of them inside the body section causes the site to fail validation and an erection lasting longer than 24 hours.

Continue reading WordPress Is Not Perfect

At a previous job I designed a mobile channel for the brand. It was pretty introductory, just news and weather feeds, but a huge step forward in terms of entering the mobile space for a company which hasn’t really embraced change since they decided to switch from “paper boys” to “middle-aged men with cars”.

At one time, the trend in mobile brand advancement was to develop a really low resolution, graphically sparse, version of the brand’s web site. The idea being, I guess, that users could user their shitty mobile phone browsers to visit Google, or Yellow Pages, etc. and find the information they need to make horrible decisions while they’re drunk.

Personally, I wish those would just die off completely. I’ve created those creatively bankrupt web sites and I like to think that all of the trouble I manage to get myself into is my subconscious way of punishing myself for my creative indiscretion.

I have changed allegiances completely on this issue. I think the future is branded applications. Google, Blackberry and Apple (most famously) have all developed, or are in the process of developing, application marketplaces that allow users to easily download third party applications to their smart phones.

Continue reading A World Without Mobile Browsers

Let me preface this by saying that I am NOT a Vista hater.  It would be easy to be, all the cool kids are doing it.  In high school the rebels would hang out in the woods behind the school smoking.  Today, they smoke penguins - apparently.

Anyway, I ran into a crazy Vista/Flash CS3 problem that frustrated me so much I was fully prepared to kick a puppy, and was stopped from doing so strictly by a shortage of puppies on hand.  I had just created a somewhat complex animation using Flash CS3.  When I tried publishing it, it crashed.  I restarted Flash and tried to publish.  It crashed again.  Restarted computer opened Flash and tried to publish, crashed again. That’s three times with the crashing.

Needless to say, I continued crashing Flash dozens more times to confirm my theory that this shit be broke.

After every crash an increasingly smug error box told me that there was a problem with event name BEX/bex.exe.  I searched around for the error online and found a number of forums explaining it was a common problem. Some Vista fanbois even tried to convince me that crashing was a feature.

A few people managed to solve it by uninstalling and reinstalling CS3. I’m really lazy and didn’t want to have to do that. I justified my laziness because other people were claiming they had tried doing that without success.

The Solution:

Continue reading Flash CS3 (on Vista) Crashes Instead of Publishing - Puppies in Danger

One of the biggest complaints that I hear from designers who have moved from Transitional (sometimes even no doctype at all) to XHTML Strict or 1.1 is that the TARGET tag they’ve relied on for so long doesn’t validate anymore. And lets face it if you’re going through the effort of using standards compliant web site code, seeing that green validation cue is the equivalent of a nerdgasm.

Both the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations from the W3C have both eliminated TARGET completely. The justification is that it should be the user, not the web site, who decides whether or not a link opens in a new window, a new tab or the same window. I personally tend to agree. Forcing a new window to open essentially “breaks” the back button.

Luckily for TARGET diehards there is another way if you’re not enlightened enough to free yourself from the new-window shackles. The DOM 2.0 standard, which was published well after the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations, still includes the target attribute.

Continue reading New-Window TARGET Attribute Doesn’t Validate XHTML Strict

Just last week I made a post about how to properly embed YouTube videos so that they’d validate for those of us who use a strict XHTML doctype. I recently discovered commandN.tv through work and it’s become an instant favorite.. They use blip.tv to post their weekly podcast.

Disappointingly though I found that the code that blip offers for sharing doesn’t validate strict, so I wrote them an email asking why they didn’t and actually got a response fairly quickly back from a rep there going by the name of Angus. It was refreshing to not get a canned message back and the dude was helpful.

Continue reading Embedding Strict XHTML blip.tv Videos

The explosion of web sites that allow for the sharing of video is incredibly useful. Now absolutely everyone can watch my favorite BBQ sauce ad.

For those of us who would like to embed videos into our strict doctype web sites it’s a little more complicated though. YouTube doesn’t seem remotely interested in making the code they offer for embedding standards compliant, so if you insert it into your posts it won’t validate.

Continue reading Strict XHTML Embed Code For YouTube Videos

Your doctype is used to tell your browser how to interpret the code on the page. Perhaps the most useful reason is that it tells your browser whether to use quirks mode or standards mode.

Here’s an example of a valid XHTML 1.0 strict doctype declaration (my personal favourite):


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


When a browser loads a web site that includes a transitional doctype or no doctype at all it goes into quirks mode which supports deprecated tags elements like CENTER, FONT and IFRAME as well as deprecated attributes like ALIGN, WIDTH, HEIGHT, etc.

Continue reading Why Strict DOCTYPE is Important

If you’re really bored you can keep checking back to this page over the next few weeks and watch my skinning of this blog.