Adobe joins TypeKit to offer very nice web fonts
I’ve blogged a few times in the past about typography on the web and the various struggles to make it look good – or as good print. Personally, I’ve found Google’s Font API very easy to use and there’s a decent selection of free typefaces there to choose from. I blogged about it here.
One of the services that has some pretty high profile people behind it is TypeKit.
I’ve tried TypeKit’s service on a few sites and it makes selecting and embedding fonts, weights and other variations on type very easy. The pricing is very reasonable, and you get access to quite a large library of professional typefaces – no cheap web knock-off fonts here.
What piqued my interest yesterday is that TypeKit has announced that they’ve teamed up with Adobe to offer their fonts as part of TypeKit. You’ll get very popular fonts from Adobe like Garamond, Myriad, Trajan and more. According to the blog post, all these fonts have been updated and tweaked to look good on the web.
Here’s a peek:
$100 a year gets you access to all these as well as anything else in the TypeKit library. Serving 500,000 page views or less a month, plans are also available at $25 and $50 USD per year for access.
U.S. News Starts Charging for Best Colleges Logo for Web, Print and more
Today, the US News & World Report college and university rankings were released to schools around the country. Each year, we all anxiously await the (hopefully) good news and, even though we decry their relevance, we’ll use them to promote ourselves as one the best ranked colleges.
For years, it’s been a very symbiotic relationship. We use the rankings done by U.S. News & World Report to promote ourselves and they use us to sell magazines and college guides. It’s a fair trade, and everybody wins.
But, something’s changed this year.
Want to use the little U.S. News Best Colleges logo? The one we’ve all used with no problems in the past? That’s fine, but now its going to cost you.
I can understand charging for reprints or using the logo in print materials/magazines, but for use on the web? That’s strange.
We’ll be referencing the rankings starting tomorrow once the embargo is lifted. One thing we won’t have is the logo. I don’t know if having that along with our news release is worth $700-800 and way up from there for print rights.
Will some schools pony up for the logo? I think so. But I would guess many won’t – seeing how bad budgets are right now.
I quite like Karine’s idea:
Do Google Analytics Tracking Codes Hurt Your Google Rankings?
Since posts about analytics seem to be all the rage in the higher ed blogosphere, let me add yet another.
I was interested in this post by Ted Rheingold, founder and CEO of Dogster, saying that the campaign and keyword codes that we all add to our links to specifically track them in Google Analytics may be hurting our search rankings.
He says:
…for each custom UTM code you make for a page a search engine thinks you have that many pages. It’s been assumed Google was smart enough to not track URLs with UTM codes as different then the actual URL of the page. (ie. www.dogster.com is the same as www.dogster.com?utm=campagin1) though it wasn’t well known is Yahoo or Bing knew to ignore the UTM codes. But then it was suggested that Google wasn’t treating the links as pointing to the same page. We recently removed them from our emails and other external placements. I noticed twitter did too.
While I’m not ready to take all those links off our email campaigns and web pages, there are a few things you can do to ensure that Google doesn’t potentially penalize you for having what it sees as duplicate content.
The easiest may be to make sure your site has a canonical URL meta tag.
Google likes these tags. They say:
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
This is trivial to add in many CMS templates – you just echo out the main, correct URL for the page in the <head> area of your site. Your canonical URL should look like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://highedwebtech.com/2010/08/10/do-google-analytics-tracking-codes-hurt-your-google-rankings/" />
That’s the easy thing to do to make sure Google knows what content is the right one.
The other is to set up a series of 301 redirects in mod_rewrite, effectively recording the analytics hit then redirecting the user to the correct page. I don’t know about, but mod_rewrite gives me a serious headache.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You can read more about 301 redirects in this blog post by Kyle James at Doteduguru.
I’m not sure if Google really does penalize you or think you have double content. It’s just good practice, however, to have canonical URLs and they may reduce the chance that Google downgrades you for duplicate content.
