google

Reposted from Life is a Prayer.com:

Today Google announced they'd help advance web typography by hosting open-sourced fonts on their CDN, and by giving the code to easily embed fonts on websites on a new website, the Google Font Directory.

It was amazingly simple: just copy the <link> code and paste it in your template's header, then set any element on your page to use the Google-provided font(s). I started using OFL Sorts Mill Goudy TT, and I like the look (except for the lower-case y, which seems to be cut off).

(The code simply adds an @font-face declaration via a Google-hosted CSS file... I wonder if it's legit to self-host the CSS and font file; I haven't read through the terms and conditions yet).

I'm thinking of using this library for a few other projects on which I'm working. Much easier than Typekit, and it doesn't require any javascript or flash overhead, like alternatives such as Cufon and sIFR do. (Source).

Apparently, the Google Bot is quite happy when your a website offers a constantly updating home page - to the tune of 1,000+ page hits per day! Catholic News Live has received an average of 13,000 page views per week from the Google Bot since it's launch two weeks ago... meaning it has had a field day updating content from the site, and finding stories from Catholic blogs and news sites. It seems the bot checks in at least once an hour.

What does this mean for you, lowly webmaster? Well, if you can get your feed on Catholic News Live, you can get the Google Bot to index an inbound link (which does NOT have any kind of rel="nofollow" attribute, so you get some link juice from Google) pretty much every time you post a story. That can be pretty valuable if you want your posts to show up on Google quickly!

(An aside – Link Juice, in case you were wondering, is what we refer to when talking about the whole idea of Google pagerank and inbound link 'votes' - Google uses inbound links from legitimate and established websites to determine whether your site (the site linked to) appears higher in its rankings for certain search terms. More on SEO to come - for now, do some Google searches on the topic...).

Two questions come to mind from this discovery: Continue Reading »