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Who Cares about Semantics Anyway?May 30, 2005
On semantic markup, conveying its usage to those who generally don't need to care, and a reusable markup guide for your enjoyment.
This is how I like to define the term 'semantic markup':
Semantic Markup is the result of using (X)HTML elements for their proper, intended usage.
This is a pretty limited definition, better examples exist, and it's by no means the only viewpoint out there. The terseness is partially the result of HTML being semantically limited to begin with. We don't exactly have a rich vocabulary of element types capable of capturing the meaning and nuance behind every piece of text: We have code, but we don't have caption; We have kbd, but we don't have childlikescrawl; We have emphasis, but we don't have publicationtitle. And so on.
Why care? It's a good question, one I've also asked. If you spend time putting semantic markup into a page, there ought to be a payoff. Unfortunately, the payoff is less than visible. Since CSS is able to make any element look like any other element, you won't see the result in a visual browser. It's only when you load a semantically-rich page in a text-only browser, or in a screenreader (or other alternative access device) when you'll start to understand the benefit of authoring this way. Additionally, various stabs have been made at extracting the semantics from a document and putting them to more general use. See Mark Pilgrim's Million Dollar Markup and Tomas Jogin's Hierarchy.
XML gets us the ability to work around this limitation, of course. By defining new, semantically rich languages, we can add extra meaning to our documents (and while we're at it, create tools to pull that meaning back out later and actually do something useful with it). But that's strictly tangental, considering the utility of HTML here and now. We use HTML for web pages, so the limitations are something we have to think about.
Semantic debates about which element to use in which scenarios are usually quite arbitrary and prone to subjective interpretation. Here's a good example: the
address element. The spec has this to say:
addresselement may be used by authors to supply contact information for a document or a major part of a document such as a form. This element often appears at the beginning or end of a document.
Then it goes on to list an example with virtual addresses, in this case URI's to the page author's profiles. Presumably, email addresses would be acceptable in this space, but does that hold true for physical addresses? You may be surprised at how many different individual opinions exist about this, as evidenced by this SimpleQuiz from a year ago.
The ambiguity lies in the fact that the term 'contact information' is undefined in the spec, and therefore it's left to the user's best judgement to fill that in with whatever contact information they deem relevant. So one person's email address is another's street address, which is yet a third's PO box, which is a fourth's airport locker number.
And that's all okay, you know. The spec is loose enough that it provides guidance, but actual usage is going to determine the most relevant and appropriate ways to use the markup in question. Individual preferences will guide deployment of the elements, and if a consensus is ever formed, so be it. Until then, vive la différence. HTML elements are basic constructs, it's up to you to build something with them.
But even this gets tricky when you no longer have control of the semantics of a particular document. What happens when you pass your markup on to a client? Ever worked with a content management system that allows multiple authors to mix and match their own elements for whatever purposes they have in mind? How often do you find them choosing elements based on how they look, rather than what they mean? I see more than a few heads nodding.
"Just educate your clients", you may think. I hope you understand why this doesn't always work. As an analogy, compare and contrast these situations:
- You just built a site for a plumbing company, complete with a CMS. You tell them to make sure to use
 elements for parts lists, and
 elements for product names on their respective pages. 6 months from now, you check the site and find a ton of
 elements to separate the list items, and headers in  tags. D'oh.
- In exchange for your work on the site, the plumbing company gives you some advice on your kitchen remodeling. They suggest copper pipes for your water lines running through the exterior walls, with a small length of flexible CPVC inside the house. You decide to go all CPVC because it's slightly cheaper. 6 months later, your pipes burst during a particularly cold winter night. D'oh.
In both cases, a little bit of education goes a long way. In both cases, the client needs to take a little initiative of their own to ensure higher quality. In both cases, there will be people looking for shortcuts who simply won't take the advice of the expert.
Simply, you can't assume the client will care unless the task they need to perform is personally relevant to them. Education can only go so far, there has to be motivation. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to try anyway; the site may be delivered to a single person or company, but after that it will be used by a far wider audience who will benefit from proper semantics. That's why it's important to care about semantics, as a web designer/developer, and at least try to convey some of that importance to your client.
To that end, I've recently started work on a rough style guide that I distribute to clients as a part of my completed deliverables. This is a single HTML document, marked up with both examples and descriptions of various elements. It also serves as a palette of sorts, graphically depicting the various elements when rendered in the site's style sheet (assuming the CSS file has been linked.) It's a rough start, and will evolve over time, but it's important enough for the education process (and easy to re-use) that I've been relying on it since I wrote it.
Here it is, the mezzoblue Markup Guide, available in formatted and bare-bones unformatted flavours, with a permanent home in the Downloads section of this site. Feel free to use, edit, and share alike. I'd love to see this expanded and improved upon by all of you, with revisions released under the same CC license.
(Wohooo! First comment. I was refreshing my browser because my internet wasn't connecting, and then, BAM you posted :-p)
I think it's good someone is still posting interesting content, Dave.
Well, don't you think that's one of the strengths of (X)HTML, though? It's interperatable to quite a large degree. I mean, come on, if we had to have a different kind of header for each site, it would be ridiculous. We would have 40 elements just for headers.
Also, I don't want to get into another HUGE semantic headers debate, but on your example page it says H1s are reserved for page titles. Why? Do newpapers or books, which are the most common header-using..things..in print, use one header per page? No; they use it when context changes. Do you see what I'm saying: creating a new page shouldn't be the only way to change main topic.
(Gah. My internet died again. Curse you, linksys!)
Dave, thanks for the HTML guide… I've been meaning to put something like that together for a long time myself.
I know what you mean about trusting clients to do what you tell them; the worst is the sites I've done with Macromedia Contribute as a CMS; I usually try to lock down a lot of stuff so they can't wreck the layout system I've come up with, and then end up getting a phone call saying "How come I can't change the font?"… :)
I generally like to try to use the CMS to make something as foolproof as possible, though; when I set up a site for my friend (www.freyburg.com), I used some of Movable Type's customization features to make it as simple as possible for him to enter stuff. A good example is his book reviews… I told him to upload the photo into the "Entry Body" field, and the actual review into the "Extended Entry" field, then put the link to Amazon in the "Excerpt" field. A bit of a hack, but it guarantees that everything gets linked properly, and makes it very simple for him to maintain.
I haven't had to actually do any maintenance on his site in the half year or so it's been up, other than tweak the comment CGI a bit to try to keep out the dumber spammers…
Maybe we should create a Wiki and compile a list of documentation. It'd be similar to W3C but with more examples and maybe have tips and tricks of styling it tags, etc…
It'd be really usefull for many of us. I was thinking of doing it by myself, but It'd be much better with group effort.
((I'll do the custom PHP coding for the wiki so we don't have to have an over complicated one, if you want.))
If you do a search on google for "semantic definition lists," you'll find big discussions about the usage of Dls…just an interesting thing to note.
Nothing ground-breaking here, but the style guide is a nice deliverable that keeps you ahead of the curve (and it's nice that doing this once will save you work on future jobs many, many times). Well thought-out post. I usually end up sitting down with the person or people that will be updating content and giving a short html course and a handwritten html cheat sheet. I think you've inspired me to sit down and make a proper one now.
Good article, but it still doesn't give the designer much "ammunition" when arguing the point of semantics. The plumber analogy was pretty close, except that we see a problem with our cheaper choice within a few months, but the plumber may NEVER see a problem from using  and .
I'm all for semantics, and try to steer my clients down the right path when it comes to updating their site, but unfortunately the only thing clients care about (for the most part) is what LOOKS right, not what IS right.
Can anyone think of any real-world, IMMEDIATE examples of why we should use semantically structured HTML?
I like the idea of a wiki of documentation for clients (with an open license) that we can all create and borrow freely from. I'm too busy to spearhead such a thing at the moment, but I'd be glad to help.
It's all about efficiency. If the code is efficient for the browser to render, then it's good coding. However, the fact that a browser supports Semantics is debatable.
Richard M – "…it still doesn't give the designer much "ammunition" when arguing the point of semantics."
Completely agreed, this is still a problem. As I say, the benefits are largely unseen. There are very few ways to extract semantics out of a document at the moment that create enough motivation for the average web designer, let alone client, to start writing better markup.
Microformats might be a hint in that direction:
…were it not for the fact that (the ones I've seen anyway) just rely on collections of classed spans or attributes like rel. I generally tend to think that classes/ids and attributes don't convey semantic information like HTML elements do, although microformats more or less imply that they do. It could be a case where the usage dictactes development though, and given enough momentum perhaps eventually classes WILL one day be considered semantic. I'm not sure how I feel about that right now.
Thank you for making this guide public.
Of course it would be great if someone came up with a one-liner capable of convincing clients of the importance of semantics, without sounding like we're trying to sell them something.
Great article. I just touched on this subject myself in an article I wrote called Content-Driven Design.
The article I wrote is more geared toward getting designers to understand the idea of truly content-driven design. I think your article has a lot of merit for designers too, not just clients, as I found the biggest stumbling block in /designers/ truly understanding the power of CSS and semantic markup is simply the lack of knowledge of what is really possible with semantically marked up content.
Thanks for the download Dave! I like the snippet about abbr and acronym as well. I know enough designers that can't agree on the differences (myself included) to know better than to try and explain it to a client, but I do applaud the effort! I have to admit that using DocBook in my day job leaves me wishing we had a more robust way to markup our content without having to resort to XML. Write once… display anywhere. Someday…
Dylan, your article touches on some of the stuff a programmer I work with and I were talking about the other day…
We were talking about how a lot of designers see the technical aspect of a database driven site as the opposite of what they do, but in reality, if you have a chance to see both the backend and frontend of a website, the visual structure a designer creates often mirrors the logical structure of the database driving the site. CSS-styled semantic code is sort of the in-between, where the data structure and the visual design come together.
What I often find is that the semantics influence the way I design a site… sure, you can make an H2 heading look different in different div layers, but if you want all the H2s to have the same proportional weight in terms of importance, you'll probably end up choosing a similar font treatment for all of them across the site.
Coding a site semantically as you build the visual look is a great way to keep in mind what is really important to present visually to the end user… it's gotten to the point that when I start building a site in Illustrator, I even use a layer structure similar to the overall structure of the site.
Dave, was it by intention or accident that your ordered list example in the Markup Guide visually appears as a bulleted list?
Nice work Dave. The style guide is the item that we all know we should provide but often times, we treat it as either an afterthought or we neglect to include it at all. Your guide is concise, easy-to-follow and really quite essential for the long-term maintenance of the site.
That said, I'm still not entirely convinced of the importance of perfect semantics in 2005. In 2010, maybe. In 2005, not so much. You mention that the benefit is largely for assistive devices and I agree in that generally having a bunch of marked up headlines to scan over is a good thing, but I feel like the general ordering and cleanliness of the code and contents is more helpful to assistive devices than marking up every single abbreviation and citation and blockquote perfectly. In the end, both are important, but I just wonder how far tags actually go in creating a great user experience if a lot of other stuff isn't specifically tailored for a non-graphical browser.
The other alleged benefit of semantic markup is that believers in the Semantic Web claim that machines will eventually be able to derive meaning from web pages in an intensely accurate way via the interpretation of tagged content. This is the more speculative benefit and one that, if it materializes, we likely won't see until 2010 or so. Maybe then, maybe never.
I find myself in terrible trouble when I write essays, because I am seemingly unable to outline. It's not that I can't do it, simply that I find it's easier to just transcribe exactly what is in my head and leave it to the reader to intuitively understand what I mean.
That's where the problem I see in teching clients how to write syntactically correct and consistant code. Unless they're an eccentric web design enthusiast, they probably are going to try to write like they'd write an essay — assuming the reader understands the gist of what each piece of information means.
You spoke about people needing both knowledge and inspiration in order to use proper markup, I think they also need to simply understand the philosophy. Your average user doesn't understand that when you publish on the internet, your content need to be comprehensible to computers as well as readers. I think a quick exposé on that philosophy would also be important in a client markup guide.
(Unrelated, there's a bug firing on your content guide — in Firefox 1.0.4 when you hover the cited link, it causes the markupguide div to become a tad anorexic. No idea why it happens, but it's strange.)
This is good stuff, Dave. I like that you call out specific cases where em and strong might not necessarily apply.
As for "ammunition" for semantic markup — agreed that the case is a little weak right now. Perhaps the simplest argument you can make is that semantic markup integrates nicely with CSS. If you want to change the style of all your table captions, it's easy to do so if you have been consistently using the caption element. Of course there's no *technical* reason why you couldn't use spans and classes, but then you have to reinvent your own syntax every time. When the language hands you a nice clean label, why not use it?
I'm also seeing the same ordered list glitch as Robert Hahn. I'm using Safari 1.x on Panther.
My own personal favourite definition of semantics is:
"the study or science of meaning in language."
The key point here being the 'meaning in language' bit. We should use semantic language to give our *documents* meaning, as oppose to our displayed pages. The reason we should so this is to make life easier for everything that uses our code.
This really ties in with what Richard is saying above re: ammunition for us to sell the idea of semantic markup: if markup is semantic then browsers stand a much better chance of rendering it as you intended they should. As do PDA's, WebTV etc etc. Just as importantly, there's good indicators to suggest that search engines find working with semantic code easier which could improve your site rankings. Lastly, I would think that if you compared a page coded with semantic markup with the same page written in non-semantic markup then the semantically written pages would be faster loading.
All of which is a long way of saying that if we give our markup as much meaning as possible we stand a greater chance of having that meaning interpretted more accurately and faster.
Just a note about Definition Lists. You say that a dd can't exist without a "parent" dt. Technically, the dt isn't a parent, but a previous sibling.
If a DT element has no (next) sibling DD it shares the definition of its (next) sibling DT element. That way multiple terms can share the same definition.
I think you might want to correct that before incorrect usage spreads.
It's also confusing that ordered and unordered lists are styled the same way.
In your "Markup Guide", you in fact abuse markup by trying to demonstrate each element with its own markup - for example, by enclosing "var" in "var" tags. That's not only contradictory, it's counterproductive.
Some people (Anne) are moving back to SGML HTML. But I'm starting to think it is time to move to generic XML. The emphany came when I was having trouble converting a powerpoint slide to HTML. I decided on a whim to just make up my own tags and use CSS. It just worked…. in MSIE6, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. If you don't care about browsers released more than four years ago, then IE6-compatible markup and CSS would be safe. The only questions are MIME and some CSS compatibility issues. Is it time for just using XML now?
This is just great, thanks Dave; it's gonna save me a lot of time teaching some people how to write basic (and correct) HTML. I was recently thinking of doing something like that for my own use but now there's no need to.
You may also want to cover the fact that a Definition Term can have more than one Definition descriptions ;)
Don't get it any more complex with tables etc, it's just gonna look like another Tutorial and will scare people away, if needed just add the img tag. Well done again.
Thanks for the guide Dave! Good stuff.
A few people pointed out that there are some incorrect technical statements (like dd's not being children of dt's), but I think we shouldn't overlook the primary audience here. CMS users, clients… we can assume people with little technical experience, so if the guide goes on about sibling elements you can bet you're going to lose your reader. As it is, it gets the point across.
On the real-world, immediate gain of using XHTML and semantic language, it's mostly going to depend on who you're trying to convince. Lately I've been pointing to file size, search engine indexing, and accessibility as the key reasons. But if your client doesn't care about those things then what are you going to do? The truth clearly is that nothing's going to happen to a site that uses tables and inline styles for everything. How do you convince someone not to use a shortcut when they don't identify any of the downsides as downsides? There are always going to be the knuckle-heads (technical term) that don't listen to reason.
I was going to ask whatever happened to microformats, but I see you've already mentioned them…
Another point is CMS. After some flirting with WYSIWYG editors in CMSes (HTMLArea and alike) I came to conlusion that
all this is no good.
For now my choice is solutions like Markdown or Textile.
When someone writes conent let him concentrate on content with some basic, intuitive, email-style markup. One doen't have to mess up with (X)HTML, be it WYSIWYG or hand coded way.
On the other hand I am a big fan of style guides for webmasters.
"Can anyone think of any real-world, IMMEDIATE examples of why we should use semantically structured HTML?"
Search engines. Screen readers. PDAs. Internet TV. Mobile telephones.
The majority of the above don't support CSS, and those that do barely scratch the surface in terms of depth of supported features.
"I decided on a whim to just make up my own tags and use CSS. It just worked…. in MSIE6, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. If you don't care about browsers released more than four years ago, then IE6-compatible markup and CSS would be safe. The only questions are MIME and some CSS compatibility issues. Is it time for just using XML now?"
I've been flirting with a similar idea - primarily, I've been playing with creating DocBook-XML "article" and "refentry" documents and just handing them off to a browser with some CSS. Common support is almost there (support for numbered section headings is still a little shaky, and the CSS required for IE "needs work" [notably, the lack of child selectors means you have to be particularly careful in places]), and it won't be ready for commercial-site-use for a very very long time, without some content-negotiation and server-side scripts.
Martin: Sure, possibly 2008. I could agree with that maybe.
Faruk: Totally disagree. It has yet to be proven that good semantics have any effect at all on Google rankings. Google is, for the most part, a brute-force-reg-ex-crunching powerhouse. It looks mainly at URLs, things *between* tags, and relationships between pages and sites. Its algorithms rely a lot more on parsing bad code than you might think, mainly out of necessity. They made their name, in fact, by deriving meaning where semantics were lacking: on a web full of sloppy code. There are certainly good reasons to use proper semantics in your code but Google rank isn't currently one of them.
Zach: I agree. It's not very productive to toss semantics out the window. I am simply suggesting that as of right now, you should make proper semantics part of your routine because it's the right thing to do and it may eventually be of great use… not because there are tremendous tangible benefits at this point in time. I'm just trying to be honest about it here.
The dt/dd description has been updated a bit after the comments in here, and ol list items no longer have bullets in place of numbers. (That they were bullets in the first place is a function of how often I use ol; for the last year my main stylesheet has styled "#mainContent li" with a bullet, and it's never been a problem before now.)
Hey Dave.
I can definitely relate to this as this is a part of what I do as an Intranet Web Designer.
I don't go as in depth with the descriptions of each element (due to the experience of the user), but I do give a 'Style Guide' to the people I'm working with to show them what all the possible elements will look like for their respective design.
Now, as for CMS, I am currently the CMS :) What this means is that I end up educating the users who are use to WYSIWYG editing and seemed to be surprised that the designs have no tables. 'What? No tables at all?' is usually the most common response.
However, I give them the analogy of using Word and how you set the respective styles. Paragraph text, Lists, etc.
Once I do that, the users get a better idea of where I'm coming from. It's not perfect, but it's the closest to a CMS we have at the moment.
ps: Where's the table element breakdown??? ;)
Thanks Dave, you rock!
I usually define a semantic page of code as a page I'm able to comfortable peruse (not necessarily intensely read) without a browser. That being said, I agree on not really being able to define it precisely.
Mike D, I don't fully agree with you… We don't *really* need semantic code right now, but 2010? I'm thinking more 2007/8….
Richard M �" "…it still doesn't give the designer much "ammunition" when arguing the point of semantics."
Very easy answer for you: Google.
Google loves semantic pages (as do virtually all search engines, but virtually no client these days asks for "search engine success" but rather, "I want to appear high in Google"), and web standards / semantics will very effectively help boost your page rank and search engine results placement.
As far as you can do anything on the site itself, to help boost its rank in Google, semantics are THE way to go.
That's one killer argument, I would say.
"That said, I'm still not entirely convinced of the importance of perfect semantics in 2005. In 2010, maybe. In 2005, not so much."
Mike, I don't think I agree with you view because it isn't very productive. What will happen? Will everything suddenly become semantic overnight? No. We need to discuss and work on our skills until we're all coding properly.
And anyway, correctly (and thoughfully) coded (X)HTML IS semantic.
Also, I don't remember who touched on this, but I think we should start thinking about moving to XML-like HTML. It's so much more clean then the old SGML-like HTML.
Mike D: I disagree. I'm not sure if you work for Google but if you don't you seem to be assuming an awful lot about how the algo processes sites.
Its well establiashed for example that G uses a fairly advanced form of keyphrase stemming. Thats not a light technology. Any algo that can introduce stemmed keywords can certainly extract meaning from semantic markup. You say its yet to be proven and I agree. However its a redundant point - *everything* is yet to be proven when optimising for search engines. The only things we can definitely rely on are whats written on G (or Y or MSN) own help pages. Does the weight of evidnce favour your view? I don't know. All I do know is that, for me, semantic pages seem to carry more weight in SERPS. If you find otherwise then that fine but I'd move away from such a definitive position if I were you.
Well, Dave, maybe it's an oppurtunity, regarding the testing of the effects of semantics on SEO; someone(I'm not important enough:-) ), when they redesign a big-ass site, record all of that site's rankings and compare it to before. I'd think someone would have done this before, though. Also, it would hard to distinguish between more users because of the better design(word-of-mouth, then search), from more users from just SEO.
I just figured it out, Dave! When you post two dashes(- -) it messes up your comment preview, because you commented out something which contains the comment. So, in effect the two dashes(- - end the comment.
Mike D: sorry, what? Sure, incoming links aid much more in your google ranking, but Google has definitely been favoring clean, semantic sites over nested tables-ridden sites, or frameset sites, and so forth. At least for about a year, now. I've seen sites without any incoming links show up on Google in the first 10 results, having semantic markup and getting a pagerank of 5, versus sites with plenty of incoming links, but being frameset sites with horrible markup, pagerank 0, and hardly appearing in Google.
Do good URI's work great in Google? Yes, definitely.
Do incoming links help boost your rank in Google's results? Yes, definitely.
Does semantic markup help you? Yes, not as much as the previous two, but it _does_ help.
I've found of late that Google is doing a lot with headings, which is exactly what it should do. This is very simple semantic markup making a difference.
Rimantas : It's true that wysiwyg editors like HTMLarea allow people to do anything, and this is no good. Nobody wants people to write a page in pruple Comic Sans and ruin your larefully crafted layout by adding coluns.
Another wysiwyg editor has a better approach : Tiny MCE. With this one you can define what the user can do. You can activate or deactivate every button and list. You could choose to simply offer a few buttons with strong and em and a list of predefined styles.
Sorry Faruk but I call BS on that that one. There is no way a site with zero incoming links will receive a high page rank because it properly uses heading tags. I think you're confusing two issues here (and possibly three):
1. First of all, you mentioned framesets a couple of times. Throw that out because obviously that has a negative effect on search engine ranking and has for 10 years. The reason for this is obvious: splitting your documents up abstracts important information to disparate locations. And by the way, nothing about using framesets is "non-standard" either. It's part of the standard… it just generally isn't a good idea unless necessary.
2. You mentioned sites with plenty of incoming links and PageRanks of 0. Please show me these sites. The only way I know of that that could happen would be if the site were either completely unreadable or specifically penalized for trying to spam Google. If a site has 5000 incoming links and 50 tables and font tags, it's not going to be a zero, sorry.
3. I think the main confusion here is that "writing semantic markup" and "writing SEO-optimized markup" are not the same thing. The former is an obvious skill which involves following W3C specs and doing all the things that our host Dave so generously spells out on Mezzoblue every week. The latter is not so cut and dry. It involves things like:
– How far up the page certain words appear.
– The ratio of a certain word to total words in a page.
– The proximity of certain words to each other.
– Use of the title tag and certain meta tags.
Both the former and the latter can be considered "writing good code" and the former can certainly lead you in the direction of the latter (which is a good thing) but to say that proper semantics in themselves have a dramatic effect on PageRank is just not true at this time. Ask people like Keith Robinson, who have experienced first hand that taking a site from crappy code to clean, semantic code can sometimes even *lower* PageRank. It's not lowered because of good semantics, but rather because the makeup of the page has changed in an SEO-negative way… and surprise surprise, the increased "quality" of the code couldn't make up for it. I really wish I could find the page (but I can't and I've searched for a few minutes now) but someone did a bunch of Google tests relating to this exact subject several months ago and found that semantics themselves really had very little effect on PageRank… page composition did though. I'll keep hunting around and post the URL when I find it.
So anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that one shouldn't go around proclaiming that proper semantics have much of a noticeable effect on PageRank because they don't appear to. No one has proved they do, and people have so far only proved the opposite… that they don't. Remember, Google, at its core, does not exist to reward people who write good code. It exists to reward people who write good content.
re: this semantics vs. Google issue, allow me to share an anecdote.
When I was delivering a keynote last year, I referenced the study Mike is talking about in comment #36 - http://peterjanes.ca/blog/archives/2004/08/16/silly-result-set-1 - and said that while we once thought semantics were important for Google, evidence suggests otherwise, and that proper markup doesn't necessarily give a site the boost we'd hope for.
I had an SEO approach me afterwards and give me a tip. He said that, all other things being equal, proper semantics *do* improve a page's ranking. By "all other things being equal", that meant incoming links etc. The flaw in this study, he theorized, was that it didn't have much PageRank to begin with, so the results would be skewed. Were it an existing, well-linked page, the results would be much different.
I'm repeating this as simple hearsay though; I haven't seen results to back it up. Anyone reading this deal with SEOs? Can we get some supporting links?
Dave: Excellent. Yep, that's the article I was referring to. Nothing that the SEO said to you necessarily conflicts with what I'm saying to Faruk here: It can indeed "matter" just as having a 1.6 Ghz machine over a 1.5 Ghz machine can matter (although as I said, it hasn't been proven). Point being that there are probably at least 20 different factors which can cause the 1.5 Ghz machine to outperform the 1.6 Ghz machine (RAM, video card, processor type, etc).
The problem is that in the world, "all other things" are never equal, so all I'm saying here is that if semantics matter at all to SEO, their effect is hardly noticeable at this point. Those who make claims to the effect of proper semantics completely reinventing a page's SEO-effectiveness are being disingenuous in my opinion.
"if semantics matter at all to SEO, their effect is hardly noticeable at this point"
That's where I'm at too. Proper semantics are nice, and will likely help SEO to some degree, but they're not a huge Google-boost on their own. There are a lot more factors in play that probably matter more. The 1.5/1.6Ghz analogy is great.
I'm certainly willing to revise that opinion in the face of solid testing and analysis, but I've yet to see any beyond Peter Janes' initial piece.
Mike: seems you're definitely right on one thing. I can only find frameset sites with incoming links and a PR of 0 or 1. No non-framebased sites I've found (in a quick 10-minute scan) have such low PR when they have incoming links, but that doesn't surprise me, as I never said semantic markup was superior to incoming links for Google (in fact, I did acknowledge the opposite).
However, I do have one example of a site with "no" incoming links, and a PR of 4: xhtml.nl
This site has no incoming links on www.xhtml.nl, and only incoming links of ITSELF on just xhtml.nl. Yet, this site has a Pagerank of 4.
I stand corrected in that semantics don't aid as "much" as I thought they did, but the XHTML.nl example does at least show that there are cases where it's definitely not incoming links boosting a site's Pagerank. Whether it's the semantic markup of XHTML.nl or something else, I can't quite tell, but it's certainly not incoming links.
Additionally, Google's been changing their system over the past week, I hear. Who knows what might change concerning this, now and/or in the future.
Dave S:
I think there's only one truly proper way of doing tests for this, and that's registering 2 new domains, putting the exact same content on each, but one in semantic markup and the other in horrible markup. Same URI structure, no publications of the URL's anywhere, only submit the site to Google for crawling and then, after a week, check the results. Do they both show up? Does one site show up higher than the other?
Maybe I'll just do this experiment after the @media conference. Definitely don't have time for it before then…
Mike D: I'm using someone else's IRC-plugin, I should ask how it works exactly, as I do not know myself. I do know however that its results are reliable as they are the exact same as the toolbar gives.
I checked one of the first actual pages from said framesite and it has a PR of 2, instead of the 1 that the site as a whole, has.
Would it be possible to us to create a page with all known information? A wiki would be very suitable for this. Then atleast we can easily view a single place.
Faruk: I'm conducting some tests as we speak… just for kicks. They are similar to the tests Peter Janes conducted, but with a slightly different methodology. I have a pretty high PageRank to begin with so hopefully what the SEO guy mentioned to Dave at that conference won't be of issue here. I've actually wanted to do this for quite some time but just never got around to doing anything too scientific.
As for the "xhtml.nl" example you gave, I reckon that site's PageRank might come from the fact that there are 1450 references to the term "xhtml.nl" on the web, and that is the exact domain of the site you're talking about. Domain character matches do a lot for PageRank.
Mike D:
Do keep us (or me, at least) up to date on the details of your tests. Dave's (not DaveS) idea of a wiki about such things might have some merit, though I think a well-written article that takes all of our tests into account fully is more useful..
As for XHTML.nl - I see. Well, it seems then that Google severely punished frame-based sites, because the main frame-based site I was using for comparisons has 19,000 mentions in google on just the domain without TLD, and 17,500 on the domainname _with_ TLD. Still that page has a PR of 1… even with over 800 incoming links.
Faruk: What tool are you using to check PageRank, out of curiosity? I don't think that Google actually physically punishes framed sites (unless they do other things to get themselves punished), but generally an *actual* frameset page will receive a low PageRank because there's simply nothing to index. There's not even a body tag in a frameset page… no content either, unless the site uses the noframes tag. Have you tried checking the PageRank of any individual frames within the site? That is, documents with actual content in them?
Thanks for the download, Dave! This will prove useful not only for illustrating semantics, but for barebones styling purposes, like say… style guidelines at the beginning of a project. :-)
Anyone got any pointers on how to handle dates on a webpage? The common way is wrapping them in the semantic-pointless  (or in some cases a div). headers are out of the question, so are all paragraph entities.. So, what to do?
Regarding comment 37 - http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/05/30/who_cares_ab/comments/#c011764 - I never really followed up on the "study" (which is a generous term: as I wrote at the time, it was "a fun experiment" that was "not exhaustive and hardly scientific"). The current results suggest there might be something to semantics and Google after all though: while the first link is still to plain old text, the rest are in what I'd deem the "correct" order, with no detectable difference in PageRank.
From my experience semantics are very low on the priority list. I just believe search engines have way too much processing to do to worry about such fine things as element relationships. They're purely content hoovers. Referring to Google, the single biggest impact in terms of rank is the quality, phrase and destination of a hyperlink.
You could argue simplistic semantics are a factor such as structure but I've not noticed any discernable rank benefits for improving structure on a site. Web standards certainly improve the content to markup ratio which may have more impact but an awful lot more research would need to go into it before giving semantics a top 10 tip for search engine traffic…


text:
Lindsay Lohan has been dealt a shock after a televised paternity test "proved" long-running rumors her dad Michael has another daughter.
Kristi Horn has spent four years trying to convince Michael Lohan he is the father of her 17-year-old daughter, Ashley, and he agreed to settle the matter by taking a DNA test on "The Trisha Goddard Show."
In the big reveal, which will air on Thursday, Michael comes face-to-face with his alleged lovechild for the first time as Goddard reads out the positive result, prompting Kristi to break down in tears.
Michael, who had previously denied the allegation, stands up to hug the teenager but she tries to resist, saying, "This is the first time I've met you. I'm sorry, but I'm not sure…"
He replies, "It's OK. Everything in time, honey."
Born-again Christian Michael has four children with Dina Lohan, including "Mean Girls" star Lindsay, and is reportedly expecting another with girlfriend Kate Major.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
|Perfectly synchronized clocks can measure the bits
anywhere in the middle.
So just how accurate does a clock need to be for UART? First, consider a perfect pair of clocks, each operating at exactly the same frequency. In this case, it doesn't much matter where we measure the incoming bits, as long as we measure after the bit has changed to the next one. If there's some error, however, a slow clock will measure later and later, until it missed a bit completely. A fast clock will likewise measure earlier and earlier, until it measures the same bit twice. Not knowing before hand if your clock is fast or slow, it makes sense to shoot for the middle of the bit; that way you have as much time as possible before the error takes over and you make a mistake.
|Errors can add up very quickly when there are
small differences between clocks.
In reality, not all hope is lost; this is a worst case scenario, and likely the clock in your computer (assuming you want to communicate with it instead of another MSP430) is more accurate than that. A total of 5% tolerance between the clocks would, on average, encounter a frame error on bit 11, and 4% tolerance on bit 13, so as long as we have better tolerance than that and have a short gap between frames to "resynchronize", we should be able to communicate. Note this does mean we are limited in the frame sizes we can use reliably, and our actual data transmission rate will be a little less since we need a recovery between frames. If you want fast communication, you need an accurate clock!
Crystal Oscillators
The best option for accuracy in a clock is to use a crystal. The watch crystal that comes with the LaunchPad is accurate over a wide temperature range to 20 ppm (0.002%)! There are some disadvantages, however: crystals take a while to stabilize, and use more power. In addition, at 32,768 Hz, we can't achieve very high transmission rates. Typically we want at least 16 clock cycles per bit to accurately catch the start bit and start sampling at the center of each bit. Using that rule of thumb, the highest bit rate we could attain with the watch crystal is 2048 baud. Larger MSP430 devices allow for high frequency crystals, but the G2xx series that are compatible with the LaunchPad do not. However, if we're careful, getting transmission rates up to 9600 baud with the watch crystal can be done.
Soldering the crystal to your LaunchPad might seem a daunting task with such a small part, but in reality it's not terribly difficult. A little bit of patience (mostly in the form of a little piece of masking tape) is all you need. Aside from a soldering iron and solder, of course. If you have not already put a crystal on your LaunchPad and would like to, there are a number of good demonstrations of the technique for soldering the crystal to the board available on YouTube. For now, I'll assume you've successfully put it on.
You may have noticed a couple of empty pads near the crystal for capacitors. For a crystal to oscillate at the right frequency, it needs to see a particular capacitance to ground. If the capacitance is off, the frequency may be off, or the crystal may not oscillate at all. The crystal included in the LaunchPad kit wants to see 12.5 pF. The MSP430 crystal inputs also have user-selectable capacitances internal to the device. The user can select from 1, 6, 10, and 12.5 pF as the effective capacitance seen by the crystal. (The device defaults to 6 pF.) The selection is done by the two XCAPx bits in the BCSCTL3 register.
If for some reason you need a capacitance other than one of these, you can solder the proper capacitors to the pads on the outside. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as putting 12.5 pF capacitors on the pads; the capacitors you put on will be in parallel with the capacitance from the traces and the chip itself. The formula for calculating the right load capacitors is: C1 = C2 = 2*C_Load - (Cp + Ci). C_Load would be whatever capacitance the crystal expects to see, Cp any parasitic capacitance from traces etc., and Ci the Capacitance of the MSP430 device. The last two terms can be assumed to be whatever is set in XCAPx. So for a crystal that wants 18 pF, you would want to put 30 pF capacitors on the board (using the default 6 pF).
Most of what's needed to use the watch crystal is set as the default values in the BCS+ module. To use the supplied crystal, you really only need two lines:
BCSCTL3 |= XCAP_3; // 12.5 pF for LaunchPad crystal
__delay_cycles(55000); // let crystal stabilize
The first line sets up the proper capacitance for your crystal, and should be changed if you're using a different capacitance value. The second line lets enough time pass for the crystal to stabilize at the operating frequency. How long do you really need to wait? Typically you need a few hundreds of milliseconds. The above code will wait for 55000 clock cycles; at the default DCO of 1.1 MHz, that's about 50 milliseconds. Depending on your application, you can wait longer if necessary.
Self-Calibrating the DCO
If you're paying attention, you might have spotted another problem with the watch crystal: how do we get a standard clock rate from the crystal? 9600 baud is 3.41 clock cycles. 1200 baud uses more clock cycles, so is more reliable, but it's still 27.31 clock cycles. The closest division we can get is 27 clock cycles, which would correspond to 1213.6 baud, an error of 1.1%. It seems we've lost a lot of the accuracy we gained using the crystal! There are crystals available that divide perfectly into the standard baud rates. A 7.3728 MHz crystal, for example, has exactly 768 clock cycles per bit for 9600 baud. If you use an MSP430 device that allows for a high frequency crystal, this is an excellent choice for serial communication at standard rates. Another option, however, is to use the DCO.
But wait, didn't we just argue that the calibrated values of the DCO are too large to be reliable? Yes, but under certain circumstances we can do better. For one, the error margins quoted in the data sheet cover both the entire temperature range where the MSP430 can be used-- from -40° to 85°F-- and the entire range of voltages at which it can operate-- from 1.8 to 3.6 V. Generally we won't be operating in such extremes. Even if we are, as long as the temperature and operating voltage aren't going to change too much during operation, we can recalibrate the DCO to that particular configuration! The accuracy of the clock will be much better than the quoted 3% in this case; the datasheet even specifies that from 0° to 85°F, the calibration is good to 0.5% at 3 V. (Obviously a consistent voltage is the real key to a stable DCO.)
Calibrating the DCO is quite simple, but it requires a very accurate clock to compare the DCO against; this is a job for a crystal. The idea is simple-- use the crystal to time an accurate interval (say 1 s.) We know how many oscillations should occur for a given frequency in that interval, so we adjust the DCO until we get as close to that as we can get. Then we save the values for DCOCTL and BCSCTL1, and we have an accurate calibration for our clock! Here's how all the magic happens:
void Set_DCO(unsigned int Delta) { // Set DCO to selected
// frequency
unsigned int Compare, Oldcapture = 0;
TACTL = TASSEL_2 + MC_2 + TACLR; // SMCLK, cont-mode, clear
while (1) {
while (!(CCIFG & TACCTL0)); // Wait until capture
// occured
TACCTL0 &= ~CCIFG; // Capture occured, clear
// flag
Compare = TACCR0; // Get current captured
Compare = Compare - Oldcapture; // SMCLK difference
Oldcapture = TACCR0; // Save current captured
if (Delta == Compare)
break; // If equal, leave
// "while(1)"
else if (Delta < Compare) {
DCOCTL--; // DCO is too fast, slow
// it down
if (DCOCTL == 0xFF) // Did DCO roll under?
if (BCSCTL1 & 0x0f)
BCSCTL1--; // Select lower RSEL
else {
DCOCTL++; // DCO is too slow, speed
// it up
if (DCOCTL == 0x00) // Did DCO roll over?
if ((BCSCTL1 & 0x0f) != 0x0f)
BCSCTL1++; // Sel higher RSEL
TACCTL0 = 0; // Stop TACCR0
TACTL = 0; // Stop Timer_A
This code comes from the dco_flashcal.c example code available with most of the MSP430 devices. The example code file for the G2xx1 devices seems to not have it; I copied this from the F21x2 examples and changed TACCTL2 to TACCTL0 to be compatible with LaunchPad devices.
It's a bit of code to sort through, but it turns out to be straightforward. ACLK is configured to use the watch crystal divided by 8-- 4096 Hz. The timer is set to capture mode, triggering off a rising edge of CCI0B. (From the G2231 or G2211 datasheets, this corresponds to ACLK. If these terms seem confusing, review the tutorial on the capacitance meter which used the capture mode.) The timer itself is running off SMCLK, sourced by the DCO. If we want to calibrate 2 MHz, then in one clock cycle of ACLK, we expect 2 MHz/ 4096 Hz = 488.3 SMCLK cycles. We pass the value 488 to this routine, which starts the clocks and timers. When a capture occurs, it checks to see if more or fewer cycles of SMCLK have happened, and adjusts DCO and RSEL accordingly. It repeats this, until it finds the configuration that returns exactly 488 cycles in the interval. The values in DCO and RSEL are then the calibration values we want to save; we just look at the DCOCTL and BCSCTL1 registers and save their values for future use.
This routine is used in the example code found in DCOcalibrate.c. Try it out (with the crystal soldered on, of course), and see what values are obtained for DCOCTL and BCSCTL1 for each frequency it calibrates. If you happen to have an oscilloscope, measure them on P1.4 to see if they're right. (The code finishes on the last calibration done; you can modify the code to end with the one you want to measure, or add code to change to the frequency you want to see.) You can write these values down for future reference, but next time we'll look briefly at writing to the flash memory in the MSP430 so you can save it for use later on!
Reader Exercises: How good is the calibration done in the factory? Modify the code to find the calibration values for 1 MHz. How do they compare to the values stored in CALDCO_1MHZ and CALBC1_1MHZ? It seems many have reported that the 1 MHz calibration from the factory, at least for early batch runs of the value line devices, is closer to 980 kHz.
How much does temperature affect the results? Place your LaunchPad somewhere warm for a while (or cold; a freezer might not be best, though-- too much water around!) and re-run the code. How much difference is there in the calibration values?
Could you use a calibrated frequency to go the other direction and measure the crystal frequency? Imagine doing an experiment to see how the four XCAPx settings might affect the crystal. Which ones oscillate? How much does the frequency change if you use 10 pF instead of 12.5 pF? See if you can write some code to find out!


text:
By Tom CampbellJune 18, 2013
A British company that specializes in information about higher education and careers has ranked the Purdue College of Agriculture sixth among agricultural institutions worldwide.
Quacquarelli Symonds ranks learning institutions in 31 categories based on several metrics.
"This ranking is testimony to the hard work of College of Agriculture faculty, staff and students and the support we receive from the University, stakeholders, partners, and alumni," said Jay Akridge, Glenn W. Sample Dean of Agriculture. "We are committed to providing an exceptional education for our students and to high-impact discovery and engagement that addresses society's most important challenges. Recognitions such as this QS ranking illustrate the impact our people have."
Universities are ranked based on four main criteria: the number of times research publications from the institution were cited by other researchers in professional journals; the opinions of other academics in the field; the opinions of employers in the field; and the "H-index," a quantitative and qualitative measurement of research paper output.
Purdue's College of Agriculture placed behind the University of California, Davis; Wageningen University in the Netherlands; Cornell University; the University of Wisconsin; and Texas A&M University.
Other U.S. universities that made the top 25 are Oregon State (8), Penn State (9), Iowa State (10), North Carolina State (14), Michigan State (16), Illinois (17), Florida (23) and Colorado State (24).
The full ranking is available at
Latest Purdue Agriculture Top Story
Top Story Archive
Department of Agricultural Communication, 615 West State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2053 USA, (765) 494-8403
© | An equal access/equal opportunity university | Integrity Statement | Copyright Complaints | Maintained by Agricultural Communication
Trouble with this page? Disability-related accessibility issue? Please contact us at email@example.com so we can help.


text:
Contact U
|Environmentally friendly chemical-free cleaning for home, office and industry.
Save time, money and the environment with Swedish Microfiber technology.
Swedish Microfiber cloths and Floor Care Systems enable you to clean nearly 100% of your home, office, school or institutional facility without chemicals using the finest, longest-lasting microfiber products available.
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Polishing Crystal at La Jardiniere Fine Dining restaurant in San Francisco
Link for video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQRi5Cao4rY
OUR SWEATSHOP-FREE COMPANY cares about the people who make our products. We guarantee that no product we sell brings any harm to those who manufacture it for you. To learn more about consumer goods made by sweatshop labor, visit this link:
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Contact us for more information on our professional quality microfiber products, the choice of many homes, offices, and industries throughout Europe, now available in the U.S.
Email for information: firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
The infamous Magic Roundabout, the 2005 Buncefield explosion, even a sudden sinkhole – that's what usually leaps to mind in the wider world when the name of Hemel Hempstead is mentioned.
But a certain Boxmoor author is arguably the most famous of all the town's exports – and the one female to place it firmly on the cultural map of Britain.
Her books have all been bestsellers, and she has single-handedly raised the profile of the medical practices of nursing and midwifery into mainstream consciousness.
Now, almost three years after she lost a short – but extremely valiant – battle with cancer, a fifth book by Jennifer Worth delves even further into the life we have come to know through her works and their adaptation into popular BBC television drama Call The Midwife.
In the stunning 'White House' home on St John's Road where Jennifer lived and died, the fire roars and casts flickers over the myriad portraits – some of the author herself and some by her husband, Philip, now 80.
He sits opposite his and Jennifer's eldest daughter, Suzannah Hart, 49, and both delight in talking about the woman whose energy and whimsy created the phenomenon which has made her a household name.
According to Suzannah, Jennifer had never wanted to be an author, but was inspired by an article for the Royal College of Midwives which argued that the profession had been under-represented in literature.
With colourful experience in London's East End and an artistic flair only previously displayed through her music, the mother of two thought she would be the perfect person to do for midwifery what writer and vet James Herriot had done for veterinary science.
"She saw the article and it sparked her off," Suzannah recalls."Her memories came flooding back. But it was only from reading the books ourselves that we ever learned about her past."
Though she was already in her 60s by this point, Jennifer used a foundtain pen to painstakingly wrote out every volume of the Call the Midwife trilogy in beautiful longhand – which itself appears at the start of every BBC episode.
Husband Philip, now 80, typed up the manuscripts, completing only one draft copy before the author made minor amendments.
He said: "It was a challenge, and she was always up for a challenge.
"Midwifery was just one of many aspects of her life, but she was a caring nurse through and through. It was that aspect of her profession that really meant something to her.
"I think her creative side had been dormant – it was there but needed some kind of stimulus to set it off."
Jennifer retired from midwifery in 1973 after becoming disillusioned with changes to the NHS, and went on to teach music.
Her books, which she began writing in 2002, are based on the time she spent working as a midwife and district nurse for Sisters of St John the Divine in Whitechapel – the real-life inspiration behind the TV show's Nonnatus House.
She also penned a fourth book, In The Midst of Life, in which she challenged views on palliative care and controversially questioned whether death should have to be medicated. Determined Jennifer faced her own illness untreated and died peacefully, surrounded by family, at home.
Though she didn't live to see filming begin on the television series which translated her words and memories to the small screen, Jennifer had always pictured comedienne Miranda Hart in the role of her friend Chummy – who features in the memoirs – and wrote to her to tell her so.
Miranda did indeed take on the part of 'fish out of water' Chummy, and has contributed the foreword to the latest literary release – a collection of correspondence with Jennifer entitled Letters To The Midwife.
The actress wrote: "Jennifer portrayed such vivid pictures of an extraordinary time in British history and of truly extraordinary women. Sadly, I never got to meet Jennifer. I wish I had. To have been able to thank her."
Along with messages from her fans who share their own midwifery experiences and 1950s London memories, Letters To The Midwife also contains chapters of previously unpublished writings by Jennifer.
And it reveals details of a love affair with an older, married man – a relationship which was to have a lasting effect on her whole life.
Suzannah said: "It is a real gem of a book. I am sure had she lived there would have been more writing – I hope the book satisfies that hole."
She, along with father Philip and her sister Juliette Walton, 47, co-wrote the introduction to the new book, in which they describe her as 'a truly remarkable woman' who was 'always surprising'.
The family continues to hosts talks about the inspirational woman they so dearly loved, and clearly still admire.
Philip believes she would be pleased by the legacy she has left for not only her town, but also her profession and even the canon of British literature.
He said: "She would be pleased that we are doing all of this – she would like to think that her memory is living on, and we are making sure of that."


text:
Asianart.com | Associations | Articles | Exhibitions | Galleries | Message Board | Calendar
|Exhibition Public - USA & Canada
Detail: Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is a celebration of the legendary Japanese artist's 65-year career, covering every aspect of the artist's oeuvre from her early paintings to her widely admired participatory installations. Visitors have the unprecedented opportunity to discover six of Kusama's captivating Infinity Mirror Rooms alongside a selection of her other key works, including a number of paintings from her most recent series, My Eternal Soul, making its US debut. From her radical performances in the 1960s, when she staged underground polka-dot "Happenings" on the streets of New York, to her latest Infinity Mirror Room, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins (2016), the exhibition showcases Kusama's full range of talent. Don't miss this unforgettable sensory journey through the mind and legacy of one of the world's most popular artists.
Phone No.: 216-421-7350
Contact Email: [email protected]
Site URL: http://www.clevelandart.org/events/exhibitions/yayoi-kusama-infinity-mirrors
All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins
Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929).
Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London
Wood, mirror, plastic, black glass, LED
© Yayoi Kusama
Asianart.com | Associations | Articles | Exhibitions | Galleries | Message Board | Calendar


text:
"LV Cans" Art Print by Ian Millard
Japan's Noise King Gallery has teamed up with Ian Millard to release his awesome new art print, "LV Cans". It was produced using ten hand-cut stencils and spraypaint. Both the gold and silver versions are 30″ x 40″, have editions of 15, and are about $188 each. Visit NoiseKing.com.


text:
Photo: Michael Paulsen / Houston Chronicle
Texas barbecue is legendary (at least we think it is; people from The Weather Channel may not agree with us). But which Texas barbecue from Houston is the most legendary of all?
It may be hard to vote on this one. You may find that you need to travel to all of these barbecue places and try them all again before you can make an educated decision. And that's OK. It's the reason we're giving you until noon next Wednesday (Aug. 7) to vote for your favorite.
And because we realize that barbecue lovers are passionate and loyal, we'll understand if you feel your No. 1 barbecue spot is not represented here. Just write in your top choice in the comment section.
The poll has now closed. Click here for the winner.


text:
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microbiologyresearch.org is also OpenURL compliant and supports SFX link resolvers.
Using this site
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What are my favourites and how do I use them?
Favourites are a personalised list of all the things you have found interesting and would like to come back to for future reference, or would like to consider purchasing at a later point. A favourites list will be created for you at the point where you register on the site. To add items, browse the site and when you find something you'd like to add, click the "Add to favourites" button, which you'll find under the 'Add to Cart' button on the right-hand side of each product information page.
What type of email alerts are available?
You can create alerts to be notified when new content is added to the site and when new content is added to a title e.g. a new article alert. You can also create alerts around particular searches for when new content is later added that is relevant to your search query.
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If you experience any technical problems using this website, please email [email protected].
Which browsers do you support?
The online platform generally supports Chrome, IE and Firefox browsers that are two versions older than the latest version.


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Sunday, September 26, 2010
Pear and Turnip Velouté
This soup comforts me like a soft fuzzy blanket.
Just the smell of it calms me.
I had a busy weekend.
I had to go to work unexpectedly.
I cooked, tested what will be the Edgar Sandwiche, and cooked some more.
I also spent a long while at Rona with a very nice man who filled my basket with all I needed to paint, fix holes, redo melamine & tiles and gave me much confidence, this will be easy he said. *Reminder to find this man in November and bring brownies*
Pear and Turnip Velouté
1/4 cup butter
1 large onion, chopped
2 carrots, peeled, chopped
2 turnips, peeled, chopped
2 pears, ripe, peeled, chopped
2 L stock (I used chicken, veg is good also)
1 cup 15% cream ( I had thick cooking style)
In a small stock pot, cook the onions in the butter until transparent. Add the carrots, cook for 5 minutes more, stirring from time to time. Add the turnips and pear. Cook for 5-7 minutes until caramelized. Add the stock and cook until vegetables are soft. Pass through a strainer and add cream, a good pinch of nutmeg and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve with fresh thyme leaves.
7 comments:
Looks great fore the winter months - thanks for sharing!
- September 28, 2010 at 4:29 AM
- Lauren Fister said...
This looks wonderful!! Can't wait to try.
- September 28, 2010 at 10:19 AM
- Lauren Fister said...
This looks wonderful!!
- September 28, 2010 at 10:19 AM
- Debbie said...
so interesting...unique...out of the box...love it!
- September 28, 2010 at 11:01 AM
- Julie said...
This sounds fantastic... perfect for fall! If I can find some good turnips, I will definitely try it.
- September 28, 2010 at 1:11 PM
- ila said...
this. looks. FANTASTIC!
- October 3, 2010 at 11:38 AM
This looks wonderful!
Does pass through a strainer mean to blitz it with a food processor?
- October 13, 2012 at 3:58 PM
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Fair, Upfront Pricing
Informed & Knowledgeable Staff
Pre-Owned Vehicle Standards
Service Comfort & Amenities
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If you want a midsize SUV, but you also want the power and torque of a V8 engine, the Durango is just about the only choice you have. It also looks great, offers decent passenger space for up to seven, and can tow heavy loads. -Kelley Blue Book
3.09 Rear Axle Ratio, 230MM Rear Axle, 110 mph Maximum Speed Calibration, 700 Amp Maintenance Free Battery, Heavy Duty Engine Cooling, 2 Speed On Demand Transfer Case, GVWR: 7,100 lbs
The West Hills Auto Plex in Bremerton, consists of 8 rooftops and 15 manufacturer brands. The Auto Plex also houses the largest inventory of pre-owned vehicle on the Kitsap Peninsula. The diversity of our new and pre-owned inventory gives us the flexibility and incentive to meet all of our customer's needs.
New vehicle pricing includes all offers and incentives. Tax, Title, Accessories and Tags not included in vehicle prices shown and must be paid by the purchaser. While great effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information on this site, errors do occur so please verify information with a customer service rep. This is easily done by calling us at (360) 616-3036 or by visiting us at the dealership.
**With approved credit. Terms may vary. Monthly payments are only estimates derived from the vehicle price with a 72 month term, 4.9% interest and 20% downpayment.
Prices shown are Manufacturer Suggested Retail Prices only and do not include taxes, license or dealer installed accessories. MSRP is an acronym for Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price it is not our sale price and is used for comparison purposes only. Contact a dealer representative with any questions. All vehicles are one of each. A negotiable dealer documentary service fee of up to $150 may be added to the sale price or capitalized cost. All offers expire on close of business the day subject content is removed from website and all financing is subject to credit approval. All transactions are negotiable including price, trade allowance, interest rate (of which the dealer may retain a portion) term and documentary service fee. Any agreement is subject to execution of contract documents. Every reasonable effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this data. Please verify any information in question with a dealership sales representative prior to the sale of this vehicle.
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|Before making any changes to your system, please read everything carefully and try to understand what you are doing. If you're modifying any files on your system, keep copies of the unmodified version and be sure you can revert to those old version - even if your Xserver is not starting any longer.
|Some of the changes mentioned below are said to increase the temperature of your GPU. In any case, monitor your graphic card to make sure it isn't getting too hot!
Several popular graphics cards out there - especiall NVIDIA ones - exhibit performance problems with KDE4. These performance hits mostly concern Plasma - the KDE4 desktop - and KWin - the KDE window-manager. Generally speaking this isn't due to KDE4 being unoptimized but a problem with the cards' graphics drivers. This page encompasses certain problems that might arise and how to get rid of them.
For both of the big graphics chip manufacturers there's 2 seperate graphics drivers each:
|TODO: section about radeonhd and fglrx driver - I don't own an ATI card Lemma
It's usually advisable to stay up-to-date as improvements are being made in the drivers. Thus a first step in improving your KDE4 experience should be checking your current driver and updating if it's outdated. Please refer to your distribution's documentation on how to do that.
While it might increase performance even more I do NOT recommend to install beta quality drivers because your system's stability will usually decreases a lot.
Attributes set using the nvidia-settings utility aren't permanently saved. Thus you have to set them every time you restart your Xserver. This can be done conveniently by adding the lines to set the features to your ~/.xinitrc.
KDE4's systemsettings allows you to tweak some kwin settings as well. You can find the settings in Desktop -> Desktop Effects -> Advanced Options. Depending on your card either OpenGL or XRender might work better. For OpenGL changing the OpenGL mode might change performance as well. Please bear in mind that changing some of the tweaks mentioned below might force you to change your settings.
If for some reason your Xserver hangs after hitting the Apply button on the dialog and your settings get reverted because you can't confirm your changes in time, try again. Usually it will be faster on one of the subsequent tries. If it doesn't you can still change your settings in ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc.
This section summarizes several symptoms you might encounter and tries to explain possible causes.
$ XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 konsoleon the command-line and try to resize the new konsole window (setting the environment variable XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS turns off ARGB visuals). If it resizes without problems, then this is certainly one of the problems you're facing.
Section "Device" ... Option "BackingStore" "true" ... EndSection "Device"This works for some (eg. konsole) but unfortunately not all windows.
$ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2This works for some (but unfortunately not all) NVIDIA cards.
$ nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=2 -a GlyphCache=1This works for some (but unfortunately not all) NVIDIA cards. Some cards reportedly work better using InitialPixmapPlacement=1 (or maybe even 3)
[1] -- Thread about graphics issues on the NVIDIA forums.


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View from the start of the Angel's Landing or West Rim Trail in Zion National Park, Utah.
Check out more photos at JonJasper.com
Many panoramas of Zion National Park's trails, views, canyons, and peaks. Zion National Park is known for it large exposure of the Navajo sandstone's steep red walled cliffs and world classic canyons and canyoneering routes.


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Finally- The perfectly engineered solution to the classic card control. The KornerSHORTTM device creates a perfectly round, perfectly smooth corner every time. Any effect that requires the location, control, or force of a card is cleaner, easier and more "magical" with the KornerSHORTTM. Carry it in your pocket! High- quality, die-cast construction that will last a lifetime. Complete with detailed instructions for seven killer applications.
Your card technique is about to make a quantum leap!
"Cuts corners better than devices that cost four times as much, I love it!" -Rafael Benatar
Includes Cutting Corners, George Schindler's treatise on the corner short with applications, locations and forces, plus ten great effects. The real, inside work on the "short" that pro card men have kept secret for years!
Do you own this product? Write a review.


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ATLANTA - Friends and family members say an Atlanta woman who writes a raw foods blog has been missing for several days after traveling to Texas.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports 31-year-old Victoria Moon Erickson was last seen Monday in Houston. Friends say Erickson's car, along with her dog and cellphone, were found Tuesday.
Houston police spokesman Victor Senties says investigators are looking into Erickson's disappearance.
Those who know Erickson say they believe she had been under stress. According to her blog, Permission to Heal, she was in Texas to meet someone she thought was her lost brother.
The missing woman's father, William Erickson, says he doesn't suspect foul play but rather thinks his daughter is lost.


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Dear Editor,
To whom it may concern, especially residents of Rizer Avenue and Neal Street. Cats are being caught in 'Have a Heart' cages and taken out on the highway and turned loose with no water, food or shelter.
This is inhumane and is being reported to the Humane Society.
Also, it is against the law to dump animals on the road.
If your cat goes missing, you can be sure this is what happened. I hope this doesn't happen to you.
Cecilia Warner
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Music festival is Sunday near Hillsboro
Those who attend the annual outdoor Songs on the Lawn mini-music festival Sunday at WillowSpring Downs in rural Hillsboro will have a day of music and food.
Six local music groups including The Bethesda Band, Book of JEBB, Five Times Harder, Country Jamboree, and Cottonwood River Band will play from 5 to 8 p.m.
A hamburger and hotdog dinner, kettle corn, and ice cream from Salted Creamery will be available.
Guests are asked to bring table service, lawn chairs, and blankets.
WillowSpring Downs is located at 1582 Falcon Rd., rural Hillsboro. In case of rain, the event will be held at Goessel Elementary School.
The event is a benefit for the Mennonite Central Committee. For more information call (316) 283-2720 or (620) 386-0709.


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Adam Rooney hit a first-half hat-trick as Aberdeen cruised past Daugava Riga in the first qualifying round of the Europa League.
Ronney took his tally over the two ties to five as the Dons won 3-0 in Latvia for an 8-0 aggregate victory.
Aberdeen went into the game knowing the tie was safe but there must have been some concerns over the approach of the Latvian side, who had two men sent off and a further five booked at Pittodrie.
But there were no bookings at all in the Latvian capital as the Dons produced another convincing display to set up a second-round clash with Dutch side Groningen, although they lost Jonny Hayes to injury in the second half.
Aberdeen boss Derek McInnes brought in Ashton Taylor for his debut at left-back, allowing Hayes to move further up the park in place of the injured Peter Pawlett, who was kicked off the ball in the first leg. Andy Considine also came in with Russell Anderson rested.
The hosts made a decent start but Emils Knapsis and Mantas Savenas fired over when presented with early chances and the Dons quickly took control.
Niall McGinn came close after a good knockdown from Rooney, who soon opened the scoring in the 22nd minute after a spell of pressure.
Rooney's deft touch lifted the ball over the home goalkeeper after Hayes had crossed to the near post.
Jamie Langfield made a good stop from Knapsis after a ball over the top caught the Dons out before Shay Logan fired just wide at the other end.
Rooney netted again in the 40th minute after home goalkeeper Janis Krumins, who did not play at Pittodrie, missed Logan's cross and allowed the former Inverness striker an easy tap-in.
The forward completed his 23-minute hat-trick just before the break after great play from Hayes, who burst into the box and played the ball to the back post for Rooney to sweep home.
Hayes went off injured just after the hour mark with Cammy Smith coming on and it was a quiet second half as Aberdeen played out the game.
Nicky Low and 16-year-old midfielder Scott Wright came on as the Dons comfortably saw off Daugava's attempts to force a consolation goal.
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