The Venture Skills blog made it’s first post one year today, the post stamps are incorrect by the way I was fiddling with them when testing the posts but this is the opening lines…
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The first round of beta’s for Drupal 6 is out and its better the ever, you can grab the code from Drupal main site at drupal.org and read all the new features from the release notice.
After eight months of development, we are proud to let you know that the first beta version of the Drupal 6.x family is released. This beta includes a tremendous number of new features and new programming APIs for both users and developers.
http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-beta1
Comment spam sucks, its as simple as here at Venture Skills blog we get hundreds of spam a day most are caught by Akismet but not all are. If your hosting your own blog or site then no doubt you have tried many combinations. One simple method of reducing spam is a CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” These provide puzzles which are easy for a human to solve but are much more difficult for a machine. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you have a question, perhaps you been trawling the forums, and your question has gone unanswered, maybe your not sure how to word your question or your afraid you would be laughed at?
We want to help and will be running a weekly column where we will try to get you the answer, and if we don’t know the answer we will try and find it for you. So what sorts of questions can or will we answer?
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Their are plenty of guides out there dedicated to the subject of creating sites for niches and complete case studies on SEO for a niche site, my favourite series by far is by Matt Coddington at Net Business Blog and his current series a case study of a niche is a fantastic read, you could also try Self made minds Blog by Scott and Al or Ashs’ very quick guide. So what can I possibly add to the subject, well this series will combine several passions of the blog Drupal and SEO/SEM as we look at how to develop a niche based Drupal site, monetize it and promote it. What’s more we will be following a real site and you will be able to see if it works or not.
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One of the most important things about Search engine optimisation and any sort of on-line marketing is being able to measure our success. Enter Google Analytics a free service from Google which
generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.
- Wikipedia
It first appeared in 2005 after Google bought its parent company who’s software was called Urchin (indeed the script is still referred to as Urchin as we will see later) and is now used on literally thousands of blogs and sites across the world. Unlike many tracking software that your web host may provide you Google Analytics uses Javascript as its mean of tracking by placing a cookie on your visitors system. The pro’s of this includes the ability to find out far more about visitors, but also leads to privacy issues, and because javascript can be turned off and cookies disabled visitors can “avoid” tracking. Even with these limitations its still a great system and one we use on all our sites where possible.
Getting it up and running is simple so lets get started!
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Its time to do a more in depth write up on Drupal and SEO there have been several floating around recently and hopefully this will help tie down the various ideas that have been floating around. But lets start with some of the simple bits like…
I wrote a short article on the Deadly sins of SEO websites these sins were on the whole received well by readers though one blogger did I feel miss the point of the article (Though his follow up post is a remarkable piece of work and well worth a read! I love his idea of me on an ego trip), but to summarize these are the major sins I feel are committed by some companies and we all have done them in the past to which in my mind there are no excuses partly as some of them are legality and partly because they are common sense. Here they are:
Now people added several others including sitemaps, keywords in titles etc, but I initially want to concentrate on the Deadly sins. Luckily there is almost nothing that we need to do as Drupal has done most of the work for us, our template is CSS tableless design, we use alt tags as part of the standard practices built into Drupal (Though with the logo extra data was hard coded to give it a more accurate title) The doctype is declared correctly and it automatically picks up a language (Again we overrode this by declaring the language in the template though this is not needed it just happens we did this time) So the only real issue is when dealing with robot.txt and Htaccess files.
Quick tip for you if your Drupal is running slow, after a recent round of updating to make all our current Drupal 4.7 sites updated to the latest version of 4.7 I noticed several of the sites had slowed down to a crawl, after much prodding and checking to see why this maybe occurring and as I started to remove modules that maybe mysql intensive (which I thought was the cause of the problem) I ran the update.php script and would you believe it suddenly the speed was back.
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So Drupal 5 has been out for a couple of months now but is it time to start your migration process?
Its ironic but in the last couple of months I have worked far more with Drupal 4.7 then 5, up until the launch of Drupal 5 I spent hours working with beta and RC builds checking compatibility and working on migration schemes to get our current sites, and our client sites over to the new Drupal as soon as possible, however as of today only venture-skills.co.uk and my own blog timnash.me.uk have been converted to the new version. Why you may ask well here are a couple of reasons.
We will be rolling out our new sites (the Tag It directory and re launch of Venture Skills main site) and as part of their launches we will be introducing new services for smaller sites and therefore we are testing a couple of the services and want to offer these to our blog readers
Audio consultation via Phone or Skype
We are offering hour long consultation via Skype and or by the phone (though our preference is via Skype as we can add video and screen sharing facilities) in the following subjects;
If your interested in taking part and wish an hour worth of consultation then send me an email t.nash@venture-skills.co.uk with the site in question which subject you want want, and any specific questions you want answered, we will then arrange a suitable time to do the consultation.
In terms of payment we will be charging £25 ($50, €40) when it goes live however for the time being we will be suggesting that those who are participating contribute a little (think of it as a donation) but we will leave how much you want to pay up to you though I suggest around £13 ($25, €20) which makes this very good value.
Half day workshop
This really is only for those in the UK but we will also be offering a half day workshop in the same subjects as above but the difference is that it will be much more in depth and face to face at your premises or alternate location. The workshop is up to 5 people and would normally cost £125 plus travel costs. Again if your interested please email t.nash@venture-skills.co.uk with the site or sites in question a subject matter and any specific questions you would want answering.
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