W3C Validation

Since yesterday morning after I stumbled upon some article regarding w3c validation, I decided to give my gaming blog homepage, All You Need to Know About Games, a test. What shocked me was that I had a stunning 350+ errors and close to 500 warnings. And mind you please this was just my home page and not my other post pages.

Anyway, with that many errors and warnings, I went on to surfing and hunting for articles regarding how to remove or at least minimize those errors and warnings. From then on until now, I've managed to reduce the numbers down to this w3c markup validation.

But the purpose of this post isn't to brag about the accomplishment. Rather its to inform others about what I've discovered.

Firstly, most of the errors I've incurred were from loosely using the & instead of & in my articles. This is especially important if the & is to be found in a url. Surprisingly, most of this type of error came from the amazon advertisement codes that were generated for me by amazon associates. From now on, I'll be more careful in this aspect, but eventually I should find some time to go through all my previous posts to weed these errors out.

Secondly, another portion of the errors came from the "&max-results=2" found attached to the end of the labels on my home page's sidebar. As I've failed to rectify this, I am forced to remove those labels off my home page. I'm not sure if this will be permanent, but I'm guessing it will be here to stay until I've found a solution to this.

Lastly, I've also found that these few articles from another blogger were pretty helpful as well.

New Blogger Duplicate Content Cure - Fix Duplicate Contents
I've implemented this duplicate content cure thingy on my gaming blog but its only been 1 day so the effect of this implementation will still have to be analyzed. Nonetheless, I think it should be useful judging from the help I've gotten from the other two articles from this same blogger.

W3C Validating Blogger XHTML Template - Blog Validation Errors
For this article, I did not change my xhtml declaration from strict to transitional. But I did remove those "quickedit" thingy from my template and it did help me remove some of the errors and warnings. So far my blog still seems to be working okay, so I guess the suggestions from the article isn't harmful and can be tried. (Just me being cautious. Hehehe.)

Add Compressed External CSS Blogger Template - CSS
By shifting this "b:skin" css to an external location as suggested in the article, I've managed to avoid and circumvent some of the errors and warnings. Furthermore, I think that this also helped my homepage to load faster as well.

One thing to note though, I didn't download and use the notepad++. I simply copied and paste the code into notepad, saved it and renamed it to .css file. Then I uploaded it to google sites as suggested in the article and it worked for me so I guess this notepad++ thingy probably could be skipped if you dislike downloading and installing something.

However, doing so had incurred a tiny problem to my blog though. Very tiny problem. I'm suspecting that it had something to do with my free custom template more than due to this shifting of css to an external site.

And this tiny problem is happening to the "Followers" widget that can be found at the bottom right corner of my gaming blog. Before the shift, the words in this widget were of the same colour as my posts, however after the shift, it has now become black instead. I'm not sure what has happened, but I'm guessing that there's a link between the css code and this widget that has been severed as a result of this shift.

I'm hoping that this will be the extent of the problem and that nothing else major is happening. And up until this point, there are still about less than 150 errors and warnings left to be fixed for my homepage, but some of these problems seem to be more difficult and way over my head, so I might be forced to leave them alone if I cannot find a solution to them.

Oh and before I forget, as far as I know, this whole w3c validating isn't really for seo purposes. Well...it does help a tiny bit though because with the proper codings, the search engines can better "read" and understand your blog and website and thus cache and classify them more properly.

But the main reason for trying to validate your blog and website should be for the readers. As you should know, many of us use various types of browsers and operating systems to surf the internet. As such, these browsers and operating systems might not read a set of coding in the same way. So unless you follow the proper coding methods, your website might not be rendered out for others in the same way as you see them. (Which of course isn't what you want. Right?)

- BuLaDiFu -