Groove 11 Code Blog

Drupalcon 2010 SF Beckons

I'm off to my first Drupal con in just a few hours. Not at all sure what to expect. Being essentially a novice, I just hope I am able to grasp enough during the sessions to make the three days worthwhile.

I've been tracking all the #drupalcon tweets and the "Drupalistas" are nothing if not enthusiastic (the hard core pre-conference stuff started Saturday, two days before the "regular" conference). I'm terrible at networking, but I hope to meet a few Drupal folk. Groove 11 can always use more Drupal resources.

I also have a nagging feeling that in two or three months I will wish I could go back to Drupalcon SF 2010 and do it over again with the knowledge gained after the conference.

Dashes (Hyphens) vs. Underscores - Which is better for SEO?

I can't find a solid answer on this topic.

The most referenced source seems to be this blog entry from Matt Cutts (a Google employee). That entry, however, is from 2005. That's ancient in internet terms. That article advocates for dashes over underscores, but it's based on rather flimsy data.

There's a follow-up entry of sorts from August 2007 where Matt seems to say underscores are fine, but dashes are slightly better.

And that's it. I can't find any definitive information from either side of the fence since then. That's over a year and a half ago.

Arguments (from people who have some evidence to back it up, as well as people who are just guessing) on the side of dashes:

• It looks better.
• Dashes are used in everyday language (i.e. natural language).
• Sites with dashes in their URLs show up higher in search results than sites with underscores.

Pros for underscores:

• Underscores are not used in everyday language, so they're a good replacement for spaces.
• Sites with underscores in their URLs show up higher in search results than sites with dashes.
• Plenty of sites (Wikipedia, TypePad, etc.) use underscores.

Ugh. Can't anyone provide a definitive answer? I have sites to build!

Formatting Groove11.com for the iPhone

Lots of Groovers have iPhones. Our company Web site, however, looks pretty ... uh ... bad on an iPhone. So I thought I would take it upon myself to add some iPhone-specific CSS to our site and clean things up a bit.

The first thing I found in my efforts was this page about how to add CSS that will only be read by the iPhone browser. Very nice!

I did most of my initial debugging by letting my iPhone-only CSS format my local version of the Groove11.com site in Firefox. When I wanted to see the real deal, I simply refreshed my iPhone browser. The same site that gave me the code for adding iPhone-only CSS, however, also mentions an open source iPhone simulator called iPhoney. I didn't try it but it may be worthwhile for larger scale sites.

One problem I ran into with my iPhone CSS is that the Groove11.com site ended up looking very small, as if I had zoomed out of it on my phone. I tried changing the widths of the divs throughout the home page but nothing helped. After some googling, I found an article ("6 Tips to Optimize Your Website for iPhone") that pointed me to the "viewport" meta tag. Setting the "content" attribute to "width = device-width" will make a site's content, appropriately enough, fit the width of the device. The full tag is:

<meta name="viewport" content="width = device-width">

The site's looking pretty good on the iPhone, if I do say so myself.

SQL For Creating States, Provinces, Districts, and Territories

INSERT INTO `state` (`state_id`, `abbr`, `name`) VALUES
(1,'AL','Alabama'),
(2,'AK','Alaska'),
(3,'AB','Alberta'),
(4,'AZ','Arizona'),
(5,'AR','Arkansas'),
(6,'BC','British Columbia'),
(7,'CA','California'),
(8,'CO','Colorado'),
(9,'CT','Connecticut'),
(10,'DE','Delaware'),
(11,'DC','District of Columbia'),
(12,'FL','Florida'),
(13,'GA','Georgia'),
(14,'HI','Hawaii'),
(15,'ID','Idaho'),
(16,'IL','Illinois'),
(17,'IN','Indiana'),
(18,'IA','Iowa'),
(19,'KS','Kansas'),
(20,'KY','Kentucky'),
(21,'LB','Labrador'),
(22,'LA','Louisiana'),
(23,'ME','Maine'),
(24,'MB','Manitoba'),
(25,'MD','Maryland'),
(26,'MA','Massachusetts'),
(27,'MI','Michigan'),
(28,'MN','Minnesota'),
(29,'MS','Mississippi'),
(30,'MO','Missouri'),
(31,'MT','Montana'),
(32,'NE','Nebraska'),
(33,'NV','Nevada'),
(34,'NB','New Brunswick'),
(35,'NL','Newfoundland'),
(36,'NH','New Hampshire'),
(37,'NJ','New Jersey'),
(38,'NM','New Mexico'),
(39,'NY','New York'),
(40,'NC','North Carolina'),
(41,'ND','North Dakota'),
(42,'NT','Northwest Territories'),
(43,'NS','Nova Scotia'),
(44,'NU','Nunavut'),
(45,'OH','Ohio'),
(46,'OK','Oklahoma'),
(47,'ON','Ontario'),
(48,'OR','Oregon'),
(49,'PA','Pennsylvania'),
(50,'PE','Prince Edward Island'),
(51,'QC','Quebec'),
(52,'RI','Rhode Island'),
(53,'SK','Saskatchewan'),
(54,'SC','South Carolina'),
(55,'SD','South Dakota'),
(56,'TN','Tennessee'),
(57,'TX','Texas'),
(58,'UT','Utah'),
(59,'VT','Vermont'),
(60,'VA','Virginia'),
(61,'WA','Washington'),
(62,'WV','West Virginia'),
(63,'WI','Wisconsin'),
(64,'WY','Wyoming'),
(65,'YT','Yukon Territory');