On Aiming a Canonical

I accomplished less than I wanted to today. I spent most the day researching SSL Certificates, then installed one on https://yintercept.com.

If I did everything right, the SSL version of the page should no longer issue warnings about the site. Please drop a note if it does not.

Switching to https also meant I had to add an "s" to inbound links so that people will go to the SSL version.

When there are more than one version of a page online, Google suggests adding a "rel/canonical" tag to let search engines know which page to index. The tag on yintercept.com/writings.html should look like this <link rel="canonical" href="https://yintercept.com/writings.html" />

Now, I tend to have typos when I type URLS.

While trying to figure out how to text the links, I discovered that FireFox has greatly improved its view source program. If you are in a web browser, you can right click in the page and select "View Source" from the menu.

The View Source Page highlights all of the links including the link in the rel/canonical tag. The best part of FireFox's View Source is that you can follow the links and verify that they work.

If you are a web developer, it is to browse through view source and check all of the links on the page. IMHO a good web developer should spend a good portion of the day checking out HTML code in view source. This is a topic I will address in my upcoming web tutorial.