SEO Expert Blog

Drupal 6 XML Sitemap for Nodes

ramiro — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:43:46 +0100

After upgrading to Drupal 6 I opted for a quick and dirty XML sitemap approach. Before I was using the XML Sitemap module which is currently available for Drupal 6 as a development snapshot or directly from CVS. The module offers settings for priority and change frequency. Moreover the module allows for adding taxonomy term and user URLs to the sitemap.

I only wanted nodes and the front page to appear in the sitemap's XML output without priority or change frequency information. Having the path and pathauto modules enabled, which ensure that every node gets a meaningful and search engine friendly URL, a simple database query joining two tables is enough to get the necessary data for all published nodes.

Site Upgraded to Drupal 6

ramiro — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:44:36 +0100

This site is now running on Drupal 6, yeah! The basic part of the upgrade process was straightforward:

Backing up the site with a backup script.
Deactivating all contrib modules and themes.
Moving the Drupal 5 files to a new directory.
Unpacking Drupal 6 and contrib modules in the web root directory.
Running the database update script.
Activating contrib modules and themes.
Running the database update script again.

If you plan to upgrade a Drupal site without having done so before, I highly recommend this screencast by Angie Byron. The video walks you through upgrading a site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, but most of the information applies to a Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade as well. Also read the Upgrading Handbook.

How to SEO Drupal - Video by Brian Chappell

ramiro — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:09:39 +0100

In this short video Search Engine Marketer Brian Chappell recommends some basic SEO measures for a Drupal site. Since Drupal is very search engine friendly out of the box, there are not many things you need to do.

Brian recommends to activate the core path module and to additionally install the Page Title, Global Redirect, and Meta Tags modules. In his accompanying blog post are also some notes on the .htaccess and robots.txt files.

Drupal 6 Released - AHAH Forms

ramiro — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:53:27 +0100

Drupal 6 was released today. One of the most exciting new features to me — I only recently learned about — is that the AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) framework made it into the Drupal core. This means you can create asychronous HTTP request, commonly referred to as AJAX, without writing a single line of JavaScript code.

The new Forms API comes with an #ahah attribute that lets you specify the trigger event, e.g. a mouse click, the callback URL that will be requested after the event occurred and the ID value of the HTML element where the server response will be displayed. Pretty awesome stuff.

ShoppingAds - CPA and CPC Advertising

ramiro — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:22:34 +0100

ShoppingAds (formerly AuctionAds) is a Drupal module for adding shoppingads.com CPA and CPC advertising banners to nodes of selected node types.

Module Features

Enter ad keywords or let them be added automatically by using the terms associated with a node.
If terms are used as ad keywords you can limit the number of terms to be used as search terms.
Restrict terms used as ad keywords to a selected vocabulary.
Select from 12 Ad formats.
Support for shoppingads ad campaigns.
Select the weight to position the ads above or below the content.
Select whether to display ads in full view and or teaser view.
Select the node types you want ads to be displayed.
Enter color values for border, background, heading, description and links.
Select the ad style or attitude.
Specify whether to open ad links in new windows.

Nigeria Facebook Spam Hit my Inbox

ramiro — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 14:23:16 +0100

Since Facebook made it's API for developing Facebook Apps available, producing spam with Facebook is virtually inevitable, if you are an active Facebook user. Many Facebook Apps are somehow funny and entertaining, so to send hundreds or thousands of invitations and messages per day to your Facebook friends doesn't really feel like spamming.

Alas, everything seems to come back sometime. I just received a message from a Nigerian woman who wrote me a novel about her life and looks for someone or something. Since it's the first time I noticed this venerable type of spam coming through Facebook it feels a bit less spammy than usually.

Finally Watched the Theme Developer Screencast

ramiro — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:46:07 +0100

I first heard about the Theme Developer module in Lullabot Podcast No. 52. This new Drupal 6 module is part of the great Devel Package, that helps developing for Drupal in many ways.

Yesterday, I watched the Theme Developer Screencast where Moshe Weitzman guides us on how to use the Theme Developer module and what can be done with it. Moshe Weitzman, Jeff Robbins, and Joon Park did nothing less than creating the Firebug for Drupal theming, wow!

Again a Google Toolbar PageRank Update!?

ramiro — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:51:38 +0100

It looks like Google updated the toolbar PageRank again. The Search Status Firefox extensions just informed me about that. Two of my sites, including SEO Expert Blog, each lost one point. Additionally, I tried some free online SEO tools to check what they tell me, but none of them returned any data on PageRank, so I assume that Search Status tells the truth.

The Google toolbar could help here, but I really don't want to install that Google spyware extension. Anyway, as long as the traffic that comes from the big G does not decrease, I don't give a toss about it. Even if it decreases, I won't let Google dictate how I build my websites.

David Lynch Bashes the iPhone

ramiro — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 13:47:10 +0100

The famous movie director David Lynch advises to get real and not watch movies on your fucking telephone. He surely not only bashes the iPhone here but any mobile device with a small screen that can be used to play back video.

From a visual artist's point of it's comprehensible to not promote watching movies, clips, etc. on iPhone, iPod and whatever these devices are named. Anyway, for listening to music, making phone calls or exchanging messages a smart phone like the iPhone is a useful gadget.

Gotta Digg - The Unoffcial Digg Hymn

ramiro — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 11:50:09 +0100

Is this catchy acoustic tune sang by three nice looking girls meant ironically or are the 3 performers true Digg lovers? Anyway, Kina and her two friends deserve respect for this soon-to-become-a-classic Digg hymn, called Gotta Digg!.

My favorite verse is number two because of it's brilliant lyrics which go like that: