Well, I am finally getting around to claiming authorship for all of my various writings. I have been creating web pages and content for thirteen years now, so there is quite a pile of it out there. In the course of that, I have experimented with various website structures. One thing I tried was setting up subdomains within a domain.

I have always gone back and forth on the efficacy of domains as opposed to directories. Well, I suddenly discovered one way in which directories are superior to subdomains. In order to claim authorship through Google using the rel=”me” parameter in an anchor tag, the page linking to the author page must be within the same domain (not sub-domain) as the page linking to it and that is linked to from the author’s Google profile.

Re-reading the above paragraph, I realize this sounds a little confusing. It becomes clearer when we understand the system whereby the claim takes place.

1. There must be a link to an about or author page from an article page. That anchor tag must contain rel=”author”.
2. There must be a link from the author page to the Google profile page of the author containing rel=”me”. (This must be within the same domain as the article – not a subdomain.)
3. There must be a link in the contributor to column to the author page.

To check to see if you have done this correctly you can look at the Rich Snippet Testing Tool. If you screw up the result will look something like this:

I have been messing with computers for 20 years, and I have been creating websites for more than ten. Believe it or not I never had occasion to do a print screen to create a screen shot before today. I guess I mainly worked with my own content.

However, I had a good reason. I was helping out a person writing to me at BreadInfo.com. I had a PDF file of the manual and wanted to show my correspondent the instructions for programming a Zojirushi. I could have sent the whole manual, but it is huge. So I decided to do the print screen thing. Little did I know how easy it would be.

Basically, in Windows XP, and probably most other windows systems, you just hold down alt and then hit the PrtSC key. This will print the window to the clip board. If you want the entire screen just hit the PrtSc button. You can then paste it to your favorite image editor and do what you like with it.

Well there is nothing like revealing your ignorance for making you feel young…and naive again.

WJR

I read in yesterday’s WSJ that Wikipedia has lost over 40,ooo editors in the last year. Well, in theory they have about 3,000,000. So really this is a drop in the bucket. But it was enough to cause hand-wringing among the wiki-ites.

My attitude toward wikis is well known. I don’t like it as a model because it can be manipulated easily by anyone. However, I have to grant that often the quality of the information can be pretty good. Yet one never knows what one is getting.

The loss of so many editors was attributed to falling interest, and also the fact that Wikipedia is becoming more and more structured. Many topics are completely closed and others require editorial review before a change can be made. I can actually understand these restrictions, drive by spammers, goofballs, and political advocates probably corrupt the database every day. It must take tremendous resources to police the wiki world.

I certainly don’t see the demise of Wikipedia any time soon. It is simply interesting to see it struggle along, losing adherents as the economy falls, and unemployment rises. I think the biggest reason that Wikipedia might be struggling is that more people are putting a monetary value on their time and are beginning to see that giving it away free to Wikipedia might not be the good deal they once believed.