Welcome back gift for a colleague :)

My brother and some of his friends prepared a nice welcome gift for a colleague while he was at holiday. It took few hours of fun, 90m of aluminium foil and a good idea.

The stage is set and a webcam is installed to record his reaction when he arrives (will post the url once it happens).

Solution for content duplication

The content your site publishes are often reachable trough multiple urls. It happened to me while using Horde_Routes (which is really nice way to organize your urls with Seagull), and there weren't easy workarounds (http redirect is not a too nice solution)

This could cause you problems with search engines, because "score" of that particular content are spread trough multiple urls. Your content gets lower relevance in search results which is definitely not what you want.

Now there is a nice solution for this issue called : cannonical URL link

Basically you just have to add

<link rel="canonical" href="http://someurl/comes/here" />

to HEAD section and you are done. It will tell the search engines which url to associate with content. All major search engines support canonical url links.

With Seagull you have to modify www/yourtheme/default/header.html and add a line like

<link flexy:if="canonicalUrl" rel="canonical" href="{canonicalUrl}" />

which means that if you set $output->canonicalUrl in your controller it will find its way to search engines

Mysql spatial extension

I must be the only one around who didnt knew that mysql spatial extension exists... It is a life saver if proximity based search is to be implemented. Without it you would have to calculate lat/lang ranges that are within some distance of base point (was there, you dont want to), which is rather costly operation, not to mention that this stuff allows to tell if points are inside a polygon or whatever, so good to know its out there, wont forget it next time I encounter some google maps/kml related stuff...

Has anyone used it? Performance?