Sunday, July 10, 2011

Google's “+1” for “plus one” is fun

We know from arithmetics and computer science that  “+1” means “plus one.” The Google+ project now introduces the +1 button as a new tool to share your resources with your circle of friends and colleagues [1-3]. And as people—excuse me, friends and colleagues—are plusone-ing your sites, this may help improve the site ranking.

Plus one buttons are easy to implement (see Google +1 your website). Pages render fine when using the code provided by Google. I wasn't the only one, however, who experienced problems, while validating my HTML5 pages. After updating them with  +1 buttons and running them through the validator.w3.org site, complaints were returned. So, a validation error for the g:plusone tag can be expected [4]. Then, I successfully replaced this XML element (for example, on the page www.axeleratio.com) with the following code:

<div class="g-plusone" data-count="true" data-size="medium">
</div>

Further information is available on the Google code site: code.google.com/apis/+1button.

Keywords: HTML5 conformance, markup validation, social networking, professional networking, friend grouping, online sharing, bookmarking 

References and resources
[1] The Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web [googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html].
[2] Google: Recommendations when you want them [www.google.com/+1/button].
[3] Digital inspiration: The Google Plus One Bookmarklet [www.labnol.org/internet/google-plus-one-bookmarklet/19474/].
[4] Pixelflips: Google +1 Button Validation Error [www.pixelflips.com/blog/google-1-button-validation-error/]. 
[5] Drupal: Google Plus One HTML5 tag [drupal.org/node/1180396].

1 comment:

  1. Please try my Google Plus +1 Bookmarklet :)
    http://goo.gl/j2zQR

    ReplyDelete