Roger's blog

Drupal is one of the foremost content management systems (CMS) available for use. Whether you are running a business or a personal content website, Drupal comes with many innate SEO capabilities, and Drupal 7 comes with even more SEO capabilities. If you want to dominate the search engines, then getting a Drupal CMS website is the ultimate choice. There are many Drupal SEO modules that can further optimize Drupal for search engines, but this just represents Drupal’s out-of-the-box effectiveness.

Most CMSs only allow you to control a portion of the URL. For example, WordPress only allows you to change the end of the URL. Drupal, on the other hand, enables you to fully customize the URL. If you optimize the address for your keywords, you can make a URL that the search engines will have a hard time ignoring. Not only that, but since most search engine’s use this as a factor when sorting websites by relevance, it makes Drupal a very powerful SEO machine.

Another way Drupal 7 is great for SEO is its ability to make custom content types through the CCK, or content construction kit. Normally if you want to make a post into a blog post, news story, tutorial or so on, you need to add extra code to ensure the post is readily optimized. However, Drupal’s CCK enables you to just select the content type and the programming is done for you. Even if you know the programming, this can save you hours of time on average.

Page titles are normally easy to make with regular HTML, but Drupal 7 goes a step further by making and organizing page titles for SEO purposes. It will extract important keywords from your post and it will be turned into a title. However, just in case Drupal gets the wrong keywords or organize the title incorrectly, you are still in full control. You can easily change the title by filling out a little text form.

Google Analytics can be difficult to properly configure, although it is incredibly important for SEO. Drupal 7 makes it very easy by giving you simple fields to fill out and work with to make Google Analytics works exactly how you want it. For example, you can tell Google Analytics to not follow your views, which often skew traffic results. Not only that, but since Drupal integrates so well with Analytics, it will increase load times, which is also useful for SEO.

When you make a post with Drupal 7, you are able to easily organize and tag it. This is done by selecting a category and writing in a list of keywords. For one, this will help your visitors easily find your posts when they search through your website. On the other hand, it will also help your SEO efforts by making your website very easy to read by search engine spiders.

Drupal 7 comes with a huge load of features, and even more modules, that help boost your SEO efforts. However, the real backbone of SEO isn’t features and modules: it’s good content. Without good content, you cannot get yourself ranked in the search engines, nor can you keep your readers interested in your website. You have to consistently make and post good, well-written content, otherwise your website is doomed to fall below your competitors.

Not sure if others are into to-do lists but I think they help me be organized, more productive and most of the time prevents me from forgetting things I either want or need to do (basically the "getting things done" concept). Since even building micro/focused websites is a task intensive business I'll take all the help I can get.

I've been using a Mac and iPhone app called "Things" for about a year. I've been frustrated with Things because I didn't like the way it organized my to-do items. My frustration with "Things" came down to the projects view which does not offer an expanded view option so that you can see your different to-do lists and each item in the to-do in a single view.

So I've been doing paper to-do lists. The problem with paper is you can't easily rearrange your list (without an eraser and free time - or you can constantly rewrite your list!?!?!). Plus paper does not sync with my iphone.

This week discovered an app "the hit list". It kept showing up on the home page of the Apple App store. Anything related to to-do lists always interests me. So I gave the demo a try.

I like the way "the hit list" organizes my to-dos. I now have a wonderful full view of my to-do lists and each to-do item on it in a single clean window. And my list looks like a legal pad which is sort of how I do my list on paper (I know that's just ascetics). There's also the option to have nested lists! Nested lists allow me to detail out individual task elements.

Another very helpful feature the syncing between desktop and iPhone. "the hit list" syncs with the iphone app through the cloud not a local wifi connection with a desktop Mac. So you have your to-do list up-to-date even when you're away from your computer (as long as you have your iphone with you).

I'll give this digital to-do list a try and see if it makes the task of building websites more efficient.

In my opinion, the early Internet was an amazing force that fueled imagination, innovation and creativity.  Programmers and developers were working closely together to find common ground.  And that sparked the need for community. 
 
It was in the year 2000 that Dutch computer science student Dries Buytaert built the precursors for what would soon become the back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites online.



Although permanent, dedicated connections were at a premium. Buytaert and his fellow University of Antwerp student Hans Snijder set up a wireless bridge to share the ADSL connection with six other students. The connection inspired Buytaert to create a community centered on this wireless bridge, so he built a message board and gradually added to the code behind it.



When Dries Buytaert graduated and had to leave the dorms, the small community placed this message board online as the site "www.drop.org." Its unique back-end design soon attracted more visitors who shifted the dialogue toward new web technologies and experimentation. In January 2001, Buytaert made the program behind the design public as an open source project. Called "Drupal," hundreds of thousands of others have since contributed to its development.



Indeed, Drupal is one of the success stories of the open source movement. The following four years represented an explosion of users, with Buytaert taking an active, but not overpowering role in a community of hundreds of programmers and web developers. This open source, worldwide community maintained constant communication between developers of the back end and users of the system to develop websites, ensuring that new versions would be better and better suited to individuals' needs.



In May 2004, CivicSpace was developed using Drupal. CivicSpace was behind the explosively popular web-centric presidential campaign run by Howard Dean. The first Drupal consultancy company, Bryght, was also founded in 2004, and one of the most prolific Drupal developers, Karoly Negyesi, first discovered the platform this year. In October 2004, Drupal 4.5 was released, revolutionizing the interactive possibilities of developed websites, and just four months later, the first Drupal convention was held in Antwerp. Over the next two years, four more conventions were held in Portland, Amsterdam, Vancouver and Brussels. A global Drupal developer community which once housed hundreds now saw the involvement of hundreds of thousands.



The explosive growth of the Drupal project made it necessary, in 2006, to develop some sort of centralized body to organize the confusion. Still wanting to keep the open source focus, Dries Buytaert interviewed some of the leading open source researchers of the time, and eventually created the Drupal Association. This improved sense of focus eventually led the company to win numerous CMS awards, including the awards for Best CMS in both 2007 and 2009.



Since then, millions of modules, editors, themes and profiles have been shared with the community. As of 2011, Drupal 7 has been released. While the learning curve is steep, once developers become a part of the community they become excited by the simultaneous power and relative ease of use for the web development platform. Drupal continues to grow and develop, and only time will tell where the Drupal developer community will take the productive, never-ceasing Drupal conversation in the years to come.