Not to be outdone by Apple’s recent launch of their HTML5 playground, Google has launched their own HTML5 Developer Resource site called HTML5Rocks.com.

The site has some useful tutorials and an interactive sandbox, but for the time-impaired, they also have an excellent presentation that shows you quickly what is new and different. As with most things Google, it’s not the prettiest site, but it gets the job done. Check it out.

Apple has just launched an effort to support more widespread adoption of HTML5 in the developer community. This page showcases a bunch of cutting-edge demos, and this page digs into the demos more deeply and provides more resources to learn how to develop features using HTML5.

Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

If you have any dynamic sites that can display the same information through a variety of URLs (e.g. “somepage.php?category=cats&story=123″ vs. “somepage.php?story=123&category=cats”), Google has provided a way for you to avoid the duplicate content issue by providing a “preferred link.”

Basically, you add a special link tag to the head of your page:

When Google finds duplicate content, it will transfer the page ranks and index data to your preferred link.

Clap your hands and say yeah. You’re done.

Head on over to the Google Webmasters Central Blog for details on this tip.

Recommended reading:

This article provides a solid overview of the relatively new vector for attack that hijacks your open redirect URLs.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Open redirect URLs: Is your site being abused?

No one wants malware or spammy URLs inserted onto their domain, which is why we all try to follow good security practices. But what if there were a way for spammers to take advantage of your site, without ever setting a virtual foot in your server?

There is, by abusing open redirect URLs.

Okay, this is more for me than for you, my dear reader, but if you’re struggling with any productivity-based problem, 43folders is the place for you. Here are some crucial meta links:

What Sucks?

Looking for specific answers to what sucks for you today?

“My email sucks.”
“My attention management sucks.”
“My compulsive web browsing sucks.”
“My lack of resolve to put my art first sucks.”
“My procrastination sucks.”
“No, seriously. My procrastination really sucks.”
“My fiddling with ‘productivity systems’ sucks.”
“My to-do list sucks.”
“My blog sucks.”
“My band’s stupid website sucks.”
“My meetings suck.”
“My PowerPoint presentation sucks.”
“I suck.”

MAMP is a great tool for running and managing a development server when you require more than the basic PHP configuration included with Leopard. However, getting the web server to run typically involves launching MAMP, entering your root password, and quitting MAMP.

This tutorial walks through the simple steps needed to launch MAMP silently on startup so that you do not have to enter your root password every time.

The issue with MAMP is that launching Apache must be done as root, so there’s no way to simply add MAMP to your startup items via the system’s Accounts Preferences in a way that will launch the app silently. But you don’t need to. Here’s the deal: MAMP’s launcher is just a pretty UI that opens a shell script that, in turn, launches MAMP’s Apache and MySQL servers.

You can set up launch daemons that do the exact same thing without the need to launch MAMP or enter a password.

Step 1: Create the Start-up Items

Open up your favorite text editor and paste the following into an empty document:

Create another for the MySQL start-up item:

Be sure to replace “YOUR_USERNAME” with the username for your account.

Step 2: Save the Files

Save this file as (or move the file to) /Library/LaunchDaemons/info.mamp.start.apache.plist and /Library/LaunchDaemons/info.mamp.start.mysql.plist, respectively.

Step 3: Set Permissions

If you try to launch the daemons at the moment, you’ll get a “dubious permissions” error. To correct this problem, you’ll need to change your permissions.

In your terminal, type:

You’re done! Reboot your computer and test that your development server is running as expected by opening a served page in your browser.

Are you doing iPhone development on a Mac? Do you use Dreamweaver as your IDE? If your answer to both questions is ‘yes,’ then try this simple tip.

The iPhone SDK has an iPhone simulator that is, effectively, a fully functioning, pixel-perfect iPhone on your Mac. But because it’s an app on your Mac, it is also just another browser on your system. So treating it as such in Dreamweaver is a snap.

First, download and install the free iPhone SDK from Apple’s iPhone Development Center. Since you are not releasing apps through the App Store, you do not need to pay to be a part of the Application Developer Program. You just need a free developer account on Apple’s site.

Once you download and install the SDK, open up Dreamweaver.

1. Go File > Preferences > Preview in Browser
2. Click the “plus” button to add a new browser to your list
3. Navigate to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/
4. Select the iPhone Simulator.app
5. Click Ok, and then close out your preferences
6. Now the iPhone Simulator is in your list of browsers

There’s one quirk. The iPhone Simulator must be running in order for it to accept browser pages from Dreamweaver, so if you trigger it from Dreamwever and all you see is the iPhone’s Home Screen, then do it again in Dreamweaver. The second time, the page should come up in the iPhone’s browser.

One thing that will inevitably come up when setting up a web server using MAMP on OS X Leopard is the need to add the PHP and PEAR binary paths to the Terminal $PATH variable. Fortunately, this is dead-simple.

Open a Terminal window and type the following (assuming you’ve installed MAMP in /Applications):

If you’re using PHP4 instead, you’ll want to specify that path instead.

Now type the following to see your newly edited $PATH environment variable:

You should see your MAMP PHP binary path tacked onto your $PATH string.

Now type the following:

If everything went according to plan, you should see the output from Pear updating itself.

If you create any sort of training videos for your clients, then you’ve most likely been using Ambrosia’s excellent SnapzPro.

SnapzPro has been the mainstay of desktop capture for years, but it’s somewhat of a one-trick pony. It captures the desktop action very well, but it offers nothing in the way of editing capabilities. It also restricts you more or less to a small view window, and you basically had to do everything in one clean take or bring multiple clips into a video editor to bring everything together.

Now, we have ScreenFlow from Vara Software. This $99 Leopard-only app lets you capture your desktop just like SnapzPro, but it does a whole lot more.

For starters, you can capture your entire desktop and pan around in a cropped version for optimal output. You can even capture your mug via your iSight and edit this into your video to add some variety to your output. There are callouts and cursor effects that you can layer in after the fact–something you used to be able to do only at run-time with OmniDazzle. Finally, there’s the timeline where you can edit, trim and otherwise perfect your output for professional results.

ScreenFlow is a huge timesaver and lets you produce training videos of a quality that was previously possible only with an expensive video editing package and multiple “takes” with Snapz.

Get the free demo of ScreenFlow here. You’ll be able to do everything you need to evaluate the software, but any output will be watermarked. The demo is otherwise identical to the unlocked version.

I was listening to MacBreak Weekly 73 in which Merlin Mann mentioned a backup routine that he uses that takes the approach of rsyncing your entire drive every night for the day WHEN your main drive fails. He mentioned briefly that JWZ (a.k.a. Jamie W. Zawinski) recommended this method on his LiveJournal blog [link].

JWZ’s piece is both funny and helpful. It’s well worth a minute to read.

Now get those hard drives replicating!