This title intentionally left blank

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, March 22, 2006 1:30am

Sometimes I feel like a bad webmaster. In fact, sometimes I barely feel like I merit the title of webmaster. Webapprentice, maybe. Webjourneyman, tops.

I mean, look at this place! It doesn't look so much designed as thrown together in a disjoint series of late-night hack sessions driven more by a desire to try out this or that technology than present a well-crafted Web site. I mean, I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but that's the impression one gets from looking at the site, right? Okay fine, that's what happened in this case. So sue me.

What's my point? This: that as lazy as I can get about designing/creating content for/redesigning/making feeds for my own Web site, at least I add titles to all my pages.

No really, what's my point? Simply that there are lots of people out there who don't add titles to their Web pages.

More specifically, as of this writing, Google found 2,380,000 pages that have "Welcome to Adobe GoLive" in the title (for you HTML fans out there, that's the <title> I'm talking about).

And that makes me giggle. It's the webmaster equivalent of accidentally leaving the tags on your clothes, perhaps, or trying to eat a tamale without taking off the corn husk first. All lovingly preserved in the Google amber, of course.

And just to show that Dreamweaver is the more popular Web development tool, Google also found 81,900,000 Web pages with "Untitled Document" — Dreamweaver's default — in the title. Never mind the mind-blowing logic loop created by having a document titled "Untitled Document".

I think this only goes to show how superior the Web is to, say, paper. I mean, 30 or 40 years ago, this entry wouldn't have been as funny, with me typing up an article on how some people who use IBM Selectrics forget to title their documents. Not funny, right? Score one for the Web.