Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Firebug 1.0 beta the ultimate Firefox extension for web developers that helps with CSS tweaking, Javascript debugging and load time optimization (new in Firebug 1.0) has been released. If you are already using Firebug, I recommend thinking a minute or two about the invaluable help Firebug is and has been and donate to this project to keep it up and running.

Roller is a great weblog software. This is the reason why JRoller and Goshaky Weblogs use this software and this is the reason why so many great bloggers are on JRoller. But the standard Roller templates get one thing wrong: They fail to set the correct title for individual weblog permalink pages.

Take for example the Bile Blog, which is one of the most popular blogs on JRoller. The title of the start page is "The Bile Blog", but if you turn to an individual entry's permalink page, you will see the title of this page, e.g. of Another googleturd is again "The Bile Blog". Why is this bad? The top-5 reasons are:

1. Google cannot see the difference. The title of the page is important for Google's rankings and without a proper title, Google will not find out it is being bashed in Another googleturd, which means less visitors for the Bile Blog.
2. Firefox cannot see the difference. Imagine you are opening three stories of the Bile Blog in tabs in your Firefox webbrowser. The title of all three tabs will be "The Bile Blog" and you have no chance to see the difference, e.g. if you would like to show your colleagues the latest Google-bashing
3. del.icio.us bookmarks cannot see the difference: Many people are using the del.icio.us bookmarket to manage their bookmarklets. After clicking the bookmarklet and tagging the entry they are not reviewing the title, so their bookmark will be entitled "The Bile Blog", even if they are not bookmarking the whole blog, but a particular story. Take a search at del.icio.us for "The Bile Blog" and find out whether a link is pointing to the start page or an entry,
4. It is not accessible. Most people do not care about making their site accessible, but most people with disabilities are actually using the internet. Setting the correct title helps them visting your weblog.
5. You look like someone who is not able to customize the templates of his weblog system correctly, but with these instructions, it is no problem for nobody.

All you have to do is to login to your JRoller weblog. Click on Preferences, click on Theme, click on Customize (if you are not already using a customized theme), click on Templates and edit the Weblog or _decorator template. You need to find the text between <title> and </title> and paste following code:

#macro( showEntryTitle $entries)
  #foreach( $entry in $entries )
    #if ( $velocityCount == 1)
    $entry.title
    #end
    #if ( $velocityCount == 2)
    and more
    #end
  #end
#end

#if ($pageModel.weblogEntry)
  #set($entries = [$pageModel.weblogEntry])
  #showWebsiteTitle(): 
  #showEntryTitle( $entries )
#else
  #showWebsiteTitle()
#end

This will show the title of your current post on permalink pages and leave the start page unchanged. And, most important it will make Google, del.icio.us and Firefox users happy.