Sunday, November 30, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
My friend at Microsoft is very excited about their Azure Services Platform, so I got curious too. Here is what I found on the net: SOA Thoughts, EAI Challenges: Creating Windows Azure Services & InfoQ: Comparing Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine and Microsoft's Azure - "The weather forecast changed when Microsoft entered the clouds with the Azure platform during PDC 2008. It would be interesting to compare the three major offerings existing on the market today, Amazon's, Google's and Microsoft's, and at the first glance it seems that they are not really competing against each other. Michael J. Miller, vice president at Ziff Brothers Investments, compared the three major players in the cloud computing"
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Demo of Two Way SMS Gateway on a USB Stick with Drupal Integration | Development Seed: "The release of the SMS Framework 1.0, along with the road map for a 1.1 version, is making Drupal a more attractive platform for organizations that need powerful, decentralized data collection tools. This recent work shows that using Drupal can give you a serious foundation to integrate sms applications and tools with a website. I want to expand on Will’s recent post about building a two way SMS Gateway on a USB drive and show how Drupal can act as a data hub for collecting data and messaging via sms."
Putting Anti-Poverty Activists on the Map | Development Seed: "Performance - Along with this caching, we were also able to quickly and affordably expand the memory available for the Slicehost VPS service that we use to run our mapping servers, thanks to Slicehost’s incredibly flexible hosting infrastructure... If you want to know what else we did to improve the site’s performance, Ian Ward wrote a great post on how we used the Boost module."
5 Ways to Get Visitors Coming Back Every Day | SoloSEO Blog:
- Integrate Dynamic, Interesting Content
- Create a Community
- Run a Contest
- Email Subscription to your Blog
- Post in a series
Drupal | Dan Karran: "new Availability Calendars module got released back to the community last night... If you run a small accommodation provider business (like a self-catering cottage, a bed and breakfast, a guesthouse, etc.) and are using Drupal to power your site, you might find this module quite useful. It will allow you to show an availability calendar for each node of a certain type (e.g. cottages, rooms, etc.), change the availability for each day, and also leave a note (such as a rental price) next to each week."
PR Toolkit - PR Newswire - A United Business Media Company: "Below you will find small business advice and resources, which have been created with small business owners and entrepreneurs in mind"
Link Building Tools To Use For Inspiration:
- SEOBook Link Suggest tool gives you plenty of tips on possible link building search queries. It would be much better if it could generate a huge list for all queries though instead of making me choose one in the drop-down.
- Webconfs Link Builder offers a smaller collection of queries but it generates the list on one page and is rather easy to use;
- SOLO SEO tool (based on SEOmoz post) should be a bit updates (some of the queries do not work any more) but it is still great for Google search.
Improving Your Sense of Site - web analytics - Bonobos: "The Goal Funnel tracks customers during the sales process. This funnel shows that among users who put items in the shopping cart, 63 percent (or 1,222 people) failed to complete a purchase -- and 511 of them left the shopping cart and exited the site altogether. The problem, Kaushik believes, is that the site asks for a coupon code early in the process. "That's an invitation for someone to leave your site to look for a coupon," he says. "And if they don't find it, they may not return." By taking steps such as moving the coupon field to the end of the sales process, Bonobos' rate of abandonment could fall 10 percent, adding about $20,000 a month in sales."
Affiliate marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links are regarded negatively as they do not offer quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as 'thin affiliates'. Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites. Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself...The goal is to publish quality information within the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites."
James Walker shared with me that "Featured Speakers" block on Do It With Drupal conference site is generated by a combination of: views, nodequeue, and carousel module and some custom CSS. Google-ing for the latter 2 modules led me to:
- Why Node Queue Is An Important Module | Angry Donuts - see also a tutorial
- Video: Views Carousel | Mustardseed Media Inc: "Views Carousel Module for Drupal 6 (and Views 2). This module is a cool way to spice up your site without having to write any custom javascript." - see also jQuery - jCarousel
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
#4: Falling Victim to Analysis Paralysis - Sugarrae: "YOU WILL LEARN SOMETHING FROM EVERY MISTAKE YOU MAKE. 'You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.' - Wayne Gretzky"
Monday, November 24, 2008
How to create a forum in Drupal | CF Web Services: "There are many contributed modules to improve your forum..."
Pixture | drupal.org: "Recolorable theme (like Garland theme) with color module." & Acquia Marina | drupal.org: "advanced theme developed by TopNotchThemes in partnership with Acquia for their commercially-supported Drupal distribution"
Economist.com - Special IT Report Oct 23rd 2008: Cloud Computing & From Cloud Computing to the New Enterprise Data Center & Welcome to xen.org, home of the Xen Hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization & Welcome to Hadoop!: "It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes."
dekePod Episode 010: The Instant Liquid Diet | O'Reilly Media: "Deke McClelland is an electronic publishing pioneer and a popular lecturer on Adobe Photoshop and the larger realm of computer graphics and design."
Sunday, November 23, 2008
ColorZilla - Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for Firefox
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
TypePad - Tips - 10 Ways to Find New Blog Topics:
- Check your comment section.
- Create a list.
- Review your greatest hits.
- Spend some time on social networking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to find out what other people are blogging about.
- Explore blogs in an entirely different category than yours.
- Do something different.
- Invite a guest author to write a blog post.
- Step away from the computer.
- Turn on the news.
- Keep an idea log.
Drupal Ecommerce VS Ubercart - Which Shopping Cart Is Better? | Slayerment: "I know a lot of people say use Drupal Ecommerce if you're going to build a big site and use Ubercart if you need something simple. Well I say use Ubercart regardless."
Which one to use? My list has come down to 3 companies: Constant Contact, iContact and AWeber. My research found: Google Directory: Software - Internet - Servers - Mail - Autoresponder Services & Coupon Code and Promo Code Blog: Email Marketing Promo By Aweber, Free Email Newsletter Trial By IContact, Constant Contact Newsletter Marketing 60 Day Trial Email Campaigns & SEOmoz's Web 2.0 Awards: "Marketing: iContact - Produce email newsletters, surveys, RSS feeds and more. Send information to subscribers quickly and easily." & Google Directory: Internet - E-mail - Marketing - Online Tools & Some of them will integrate with Drupal: Modules: Mail | drupal.org! Here is an example: Drupal with iContact | LuteGrass
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Check Your Site Usability With These Fun Tools: Five Second Test & Feng-Gui shows you the heat map of any image you submit & Usability checklist
VieleRETS features: "Comma-Separated, XML, RDB or Open-Realty formats. Image and text information..." & Trent’s Blog » RETS Retrieval with PHP and VieleRETS: Part 1 to Part 6
Future of Realty: Marketlinx's RETS Connector - a huge step forward.: "a RETS download client that provides a very easy to use, reliable, and robust method to access the data within your MLS. It has a 'Metadata-aware' interface, which means it can interpret what fields and values an MLS has available to you by reading in the RETS Metadata."
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Google Geo Developers Blog: New KML Interactive Sampler: "To the 99.9% of us who don't know everything there is to know about KML, and have been looking for a way to explore this curious little language, I present a new learning and exploration tool called the KML Interactive Sampler. One caveat, though -- since the sampler uses the Earth Browser Plug-in and API, the Earth view will currently only work on Windows."
Friday, November 14, 2008
SpryDev SEO Podcast | Volacci Web Marketing and links to Free online Yellow Pages directories, Local Review Directories,...
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide - Finally an official word from Google! Very nice guide for beginners.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Google Ad Planner Gets New Features, Opens Up to Everyone: "is most useful for planning advertising campaign and identifying targeted demographics for search advertising."
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Making Sense Of Google’s New Dynamic URL Recommendations: "Google’s recent blog post recommending that webmasters avoid rewriting dynamic URLs caused a minor furor in the search marketing industry. Reactions ranged from nervous fears that sites with rewritten URLs should suddenly reverse out their extensive work, all the way to amazement and even anger that Google should recommend a halt to something that many consider a best practice."
MyBrand Overview and FAQ - FeedBurner Help Center & FeedBurner - Support MyBrand custom feed domain | drupal.org: "Especially now that they've announced that FeedBurner's subdomains are free, I'd like to be able to redirect to feeds.example.com/examplefeed instead of just feeds.feedburner.com/examplefeed"
Monday, November 10, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Google Maps API in 6.x using Blocks and CCK Field | drupal.org: "Combined with Content Template for GeoRSS Points"
aWebFactory - Filtering Drupal Views Dynamically (or, "Leverage the big CMS and web application frameworks! Only losers start from scratch!)" & And now for something completely different: Drupal - the quiet revolution: "the 'old' Drupal has recently undergone a mind blowing jaw dropping quiet revolution, overshadowed by the Drupal 6.0 release, but of tremendous consequence to all working with this framework: many moons ago we could use, first cck + views, then i18n in Drupal 5.x; more recently, pathauto thoroughly renovated and ironed out, now we got FeedAPI + Feed Element Mapper, a now thoroughly usable Hierarchical Select for taxonomy browsing (works in exposed filters in views), Panels 2 and nodequeue (a quiet revolution in itself), and very soon Views 2, ... (and the list goes on)."
Ubercart | drupal.org: "an e-commerce suite developed for Drupal. It has been designed with the end user in mind, focusing on usability in three key areas: store configuration, product and catalog creation, and order administration. On the front end, all major systems are configurable and integrate with the standard Drupal systems (node, taxonomy, user, etc.). On the back end, the settings pages and order administration pages have been designed with ease of use in mind, and we are constantly working to lower the barrier to entry for new Ubercart users."
Notes and code from my DrupalCampLA2008 presentation "jQuery + Drupal" | aWebFactory: "Presentation in powerpoint and in open office formats"
From the client's spreadsheet data to browseable content -- how to create, populate and manage your business objects in Drupal | aWebFactory: "This is a somewhat detailed description of how to leverage content types and views in Drupal, most useful for beginner to intermediate experience level in Drupal Web Application development, or to those evaluating Drupal. It is designed to show how the power of the framework is only apparent after gaining just a little experience with its features"
Monday, November 03, 2008
Saturday, November 01, 2008
autoplay possible with lightbox2 ?? | drupal.org: "Slideshow functionality has now been added in Lightbox2 5.x-2.6 and 6.x-1.6"
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