Posted
about 12 hours
ago
I don't get asked to review books often, so I was delighted when I got asked to review Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization by Ben Finklea, it being top of my list of Drupal books to buy. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is all about improving
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your site's position in search results. It's part science, part art, and involves a lot of small, but simple, improvements to your website.
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Posted
about 16 hours
ago
Drush and Drush Make belong in every Drupal developer's toolkit. This is a make file that will build the following:
Drupal 6.14 (or latest)
ApacheSolr module
SolrPhpClient hosted on code.google.com
Acquia Connector module (from
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Drupal.org)
Acquia Search module (from Acquia's svn repository)
This demonstrates four different methods for downloading code, from three different sources.
To execute, install Drush, install Drush Make, then run the attached file like this:
drush make search.make
To specify an output directory, add the path as an extra parameter:
drush make search.make /var/log/www
To see what's going on, use the -v flag for verbose output:
drush -v make search.make
Here's the content of the make file:
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Posted
about 23 hours
ago
Kent Bye interviewed me (Bevan Rudge) in early September at DrupalCon Paris about Drupal in New Zealand, CivicActions and some recent projects. Yesterday Lullabot released the podcast as Lullabot Drupal Voices 75.
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Posted
1 day
ago
Sat, Nov 21, 2009 by JF
Security is always the opposite of access and convenience. A good illustration of this principle is that developers like to use SVN on their server for check outs directly into the web root, and for commits directly
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to their repository.
That convenience comes at a price: you have probably noticed the hidden .svn folders in your checked out projects. Each one provides full read-write access to your code repository, and you only need one folder to have access to the whole repository. There are various hacks to download them from your website.
If you like that approach, you must prevent access to the .svn folder using for example your root .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.svn/ – [F,L]
ErrorDocument 403 “Access Forbidden”
A better approach is to check-out your code in a folder outside of your web root, and update your root using rsync:
rsync -e ssh -a --delete --exclude=".svn"
If your server does not have the command-line svn, you can update your web root directly from your computer:
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Posted
1 day
ago
Automatically tagging content is becoming easier with services like OpenCalais and Yahoo Terms Extractor, offering their APIs for free semantic analysis of content. There’s even a great Drupal module, Auto Tagging (with a great writeup on
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usage) that ties these services together and makes it even easier.
However, there is still one common issue with these services: they really need nicely written, rich, keyword dense articles to produce the most logical, semantic tags.
Try any of those services with user generated content and you’ll see a common tag each time around: FAIL.
We experimented with over 20,000 pieces of content on MothersClick and our results showed that these semantic services weren’t producing quality & relevant tags: rather, we were getting very little, if any relevant tags for our user generated content.
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Posted
1 day
ago
As a Bay Area based Drupal firm focused on expanding Drupal and its community, we are excited to present a series of open Drupal training courses in downtown San Francisco (more: http://www.chapterthree.com/training).
The first two Drupal
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training courses are this December 14th-15th and 16th-18th. We've brought in long-time Drupal developer, trainer, and all-around Drupal rock-star Jacob Redding to facilitate the classes along with one of our talented web-developers, Jen Lampton. We'll be running two courses back-to-back in December, one for Drupal newbies, and another for budding developers.
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Posted
1 day
ago
You may or may not have noticed the launch of the second iteration of the Drupal automated testing system last Thursday. I am very excited to have the system up and running and by the possibilities it opens up.
In order to help others get a
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feel for some of the new features that it provides and how the features can be used I created a screencast covering some of visual changes and features provided to end-users. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
It would seem Google has rolled out a new indexing/display feature that finds breadcrumbs and displays them instead of URLs for certain search results. Drupal's already game, it seems, judging by numerous searches I've taken a glance at
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today:
I guess since Drupal's built towards this kind of data heirarchy, Google quickly and easily indexes the breadcrumbs... any other sites/CMSs already in the index in this manner?
Also, I wonder what this will do in terms of eye tracking and such - the first time I noticed it, my eye went to the URL immediately - of course, that could just be due to the novelty of the thing. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
rapidfire-2.mp3
Drupal.org Redesign Get it done
White House discusses Drupal at DC Meetup
Drupal 8 by Dries
Drupal wins multiple Packt Publishing Awards
Posted
1 day
ago
My life is once again in transition. For those that don't want to read this entire post, I'm shifting my work-life to focus more on freelance. So, with some regrets (but also excitement) I'm leaving pingVision, the Drupal shop based in Boulder
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Colorado for new adventures. In this new role as projects wrap up I'll write about what I've experienced and learned.
My goal is to leverage my experiences as a technologist and nonprofit professional to continue to affect positive change.
What a great 2.5 years this has been! I started at pingVision in the summer of 2007 with expectations of working on great projects and with fabulous people. I was not disappointed. I've worked, in one fashion or another, on about thirty sites in that time. The highlights include:
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