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Drupal Link To Us Module
2008-02-03 05:33:00
Quickly wanted to announce that I have created a Link to Us module that creates a page to display uploaded banners that can be used by others to link to your Drupal site. The module will create well formed SEO links with full title, alt and anchor text determined by the node title, taxonomy term or other pages that are directed to the module. This allows users or writing contributors the ability to use consistent banners to link to your site. Also, link campaigns have a natural page that can be used to establish consistent, well formed links. A demo can be found at the sponsoring site. read more
More About: Module

Drupal.org possibly over using nofollow attribute
2008-01-18 07:13:00
I know I missed the initial discussion when the ?rel=nofollow? attribute was attached to all ?Filtered HTML? content by turning on the ?Spam link deterrent? function, but I believe using the nofollow attribute on all these posts is detrimental to Drupal .org. It is true that link spam is always an issue for major sites, but the current solution is not fairly applied and is detrimental to search engine results. First, when most links are marked as nofollow, the true internal (or organic) structure of the site is discounted, and the programmatic menu links are the only form of organization. Secondly, the users that have access to the ?Full HTML? filter don?t get their links marked, while the rest of us are marked as nofollow, which seems less than fully equitable. I am only bringing this up since I believe it may impact the future growth of Drupal.org, even if just a little bit. read more
More About: Nofollow

Blogging with my wife
2007-12-28 20:46:00
So my wife's dog park site is still picking up steam, and we decided to see if a regular blog will help with backlinks, traffic and in general round out the site a bit. Her dog blog was super easy to set up in Drupal. Since we won't be opening up blogging for everyone, I decided to make a CCK node type, and a few custom views to recreate the blog feel that is needed. I made a separate free tagging vocabulary for her to use, as we placed Tagadelic on to create a tag cloud. As always, theming took long than the module setup, but the whole thing done in just a few hours. Now we just need to publish a regular stream of dog pictures, info and news along with the steady updates of new dog parks. read more
More About: Wife , Blogging

Ruby on Rails, PHP and/or JavaScript
2007-12-21 20:35:00
Over the last quarter, I have been doing small scale investigations into Ruby on Rails as an alternative to the PHP/Drupal solutions that my company currently employs. Here is a slightly edited transcript that I gave our COO recently, concerning some of my conclusions. read more
More About: Javascript , Ruby on Rails

IDEs for Drupal and more
2007-12-01 22:45:00
For the company I am employed at, we are maturing in our development skills and in the complexity of the website projects we embark on. Since coming on with the company in January, we have all been using HomeSite as our development tool. But since it has lots of shortcomings as just a really good text editor, I decided to test out a few other IDEs to recommend my company switch to. I compared Eclipse with the PDT (PHP Development Tools) plug-ins and ActiveState's Komodo (while passing on Zend Studio, since we do develop in PHP, we are branching out into other languages as well. The following is the comparison and recommendation that I sent to our COO for consideration. Any comments or further options are welcome so I can update my full recommendation. read more
More About: Drupal

Google Maps, Drupal and Dog Parks
2007-10-30 01:52:00
I am always so amazed at how Drupal lets me get straight to the new/important stuff. With the great Google Maps module, Views and Imagecache with Thickbox for galleries and some custom material, I was able to throw together a local dog parks site for my wife (the regional maps and actual dog park pages are further along). Since all these cool modules were already contributed, I was able to work quickly on a tool to let other sites embed the content we have collected (hopefully the point of differentiation from other such sites). This is where using Drupal really let me shine as a developer. I can quickly get to the point of the new/exciting development, since so much ground has already been broken with Drupal core and contributed modules. Read on for a fuller explanation. read more
More About: Google Maps , Parks

Santa Clara Dog Park Site
2007-10-22 09:49:00
So I have been working on a dog park mapping site for my wife the last few months. It has been slowly getting to the place we wanted. But one night I had a fun idea about how to spread the word concerning the site. read more
More About: Clara , Site , Santa , Park , Santa Clara

Pirate Day so easy with Drupal
2007-09-19 01:55:00
Lost in all the shuffle of not getting to go to the Drupal Con in Barcelona, I will try to squeeze in the another reason for using Drupal. With the pirate module for Drupal, we can instantly update our content for the International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Now at Howtodothings.com we didn't want to impose the pirate speak if it was not welcome, but all I had to do was edit the module slightly to place a $_SESSION variable and tie it into the theme. So we have a link up in the corner that will turn ON/OFF the pirate speak across the site at will on a per user basis. Instant variety on our site, due to the awesome community of Drupal. Due to the efforts, we are listed on the 2007 TLAP Day page as going pirate. read more
More About: Easy , Irate

Howtodothings.com Full Relaunch Explained
2007-09-12 01:56:00
How To Do Things.com, is a community sharing their expertise to solve people?s problems. After 6 months of specifications, migrations, module development, theme designing and beta testing, we are please to announce the full relaunch of HowToDoThings.com. In my full d.o. posting, http://drupal.org/node/174887, I detail the following points: What we left behind - a homespun ASP.net/MSSQL/IIS based CMS Out of the box suprises - what the non-developers were happily surprised with in Drupal How Drupal decreases our development cycles - from from core to contributed modules Using the Google AdSense API How we are looking forward to D6 -multi-lingual, here we come Giving back to the d.o. community - committed core and contributed patches How we did it - some highlights for the obligatory "what went into the site" I have also written up a long example of how the Drupal framework greatly reduced the development cycle time for new features through a mix of contributed modules and custom ...
More About: Full , Relaunch

When to Drupal, for forms???
2007-09-04 19:43:00
When Drupal experts are so scarce, choosing how to implement a new multi-step third party form for a Drupal site can be tricky. Our in house talent is stretched with current projects, and our trusted outside contractors are not up to speed on Drupal. So we were faced with either creating the new forms with a pure PHP implementation that lives along side the Drupal site (with a shorter timeline), or finding and vetting a new Drupal contractor that know the form API inside and out, or rearranging other priority projects and complete the form integration in house. These are the choices, what have other site managers done? This is our story. read more
More About: Forms

Beta Launch of HowToDoThings.com in Drupal
2007-06-07 20:50:00
For the last few months, I have been working to port an ASP/MSSQL site in Drupal . How To Do Things.com is a site were everyday experts can share their knowledge. We completely redesigned the look of the site, migrated the 4000+ articles into 200+ categories, and 600+ current contributors. Technically we are still in Beta , but mostly the work left do to is optimizing the code, streamlining workflow and editorial processes, and tweaking the design. When we launch out of beta, I will be supplying a case study, and a more complete technical breakdown of the site (which includes Google AdSense API implementations, custom category pages, custom profile pages for contributors, heavily laden CCK node/theming for the actual articles, extensive use of the workflow module with custom actions among other item). Enjoy. Feedback and comments are always appreciated. read more
More About: Launch

Things you can learn by just reading....
2007-04-23 00:19:00
Yes, this is yet another Pro Drupal Development post. It is a great book, any serious up and coming Drupal dev should read it end to end, and then read it all again. But first I wanted to hit the criticism that I have heard, such as 'Why did core devs write a book for $30 instead of posting handbook pages?'. The thinking behind this is that since Drupal is free software (as in freedom to alter the open source code), all help associated with Drupal must also be free, as in free from charge. There are numerous books written for proprietary software, and the hard working authors expect a return for their efforts. So is it if someone writes a book about an open source project, then they have to donate the efforts for free???? Of course not! I am actually glad to have purchased the book and in a certain sense donated back to the core devs who keep pushing the limits of what Drupal can and should do. read more
More About: Reading , Things , Learn