Drupal With the Pick of Addons and Themes.

I have been using the opensource Content Management System, Drupal, for a while now. It is one of the more versatile and feature laid en CMS that I know of. But the try functionality comes from the plugins or modules.

Heavily expanding on Keith Bond’s 5 must have Drupal Modules from a while ago I have pieced together a package of some of the best modules and themes.

Download here ~ 2.5Mb

Additional Modules include:

 Adsense / Adsense Injector, Nodewords, service links and feedback as mentioned in Keith’s post.

Ad - Advertising system

The Image systems that allow images to be uploaded and included in a post

Event - Calendaring API, calendar display and export

Mass Contact - Enables site administrator or privileged users to send mass e-mails to registered users.

FlashVideo - this is beta - but allows uploading of video and conversion to Flash - requires some special server configuration

Pathauto - Automatically generates User friendly / SE friendly readable URLS.

I have also included a dozen extra themes / templates.

More than enough to get you started producing well managed content driven website.

July 9th, 2007 Posted by admin | Web2.0, webdesign, xhtml, php | 2 comments

Blogger’s Code

Tim O’Reilly has come up with a draft code of conduct for bloggers. Now I see this as some nice advice - but nothing more. 

This makes the following 7 points:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

Now this, as many of the good suggestions about management of the internet,  out there is basically common sense.

Though the sentiment is nice I am unsure what else of use there is here. Yes I do believe that ultimately website owners - being blogs, forums or other forms of websites should be responsible for their content - but the real question is what is the point of a voluntary code?

Even with special badges and disclaimers like:

This is an open, uncensored forum. We are not responsible for the comments of any poster, and when discussions get heated, crude language, insults and other “off color” comments may be encountered. Participate in this site at your own risk.

At the end of the day this is all meaningless as ultimately there is little policing of the internet (at this level) and there is precedent for civil action against site/forum/blog owners even if they are not directly responsible for the comment that instigated the acton.

Don’t see what Tim O’Reilly has written as censorship or even a proposal for forming a ‘cleaner’ internet but I suggest every blogger or site owner to take this advice, as it is good advice.

April 11th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Web2.0, webdesign | no comments

Which Dragon Has The Best Website

Ok this is another post about BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den and we have only had one episode to date.

Having a look at the official website for Dragon’s Den (www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden) I had the idea to write a review on each of the ‘Dragon’s’ official Websites. After seeing Keith Bond’s post about SEOmoz I decided to use this to assess which of these official Dragon’s sites are the best.

Deborah Meaden

http://www.deborahmeaden.com/ 

Page Strength: 0.5 / 10

Duncan Bannatyne

http://www.bannatyne.co.uk/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10

Peter Jones

http://www.peterjones.tv/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10 

Richard Farleigh

http://www.farleigh.com/

Page Strength: 3 / 10

Theo Paphitis

http://www.theopaphitis.com/

Page Strength: 2.5 / 10

So there we have it Jones and Bannatyne tie first followed by Farleigh, Paphitis and finally Meaden. To be honest this is probably the order I would rank these in, only in a general webpage sense, the fact is that these people’s websites are carried by the people - brands. This sort of ranking tool is much more useful for you and me, affiliates especially.

Want to know your sites page Strength - see http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

February 12th, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, webdesign, Dragon's Den | no comments

Affiliate Toolbox Part 2 - Web Design and Doing it right.

CSS Layout Generators

http://www.ibdjohn.com/csstemplate/ - OK but seems to be a little buggy in producing the CSS code

http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php This is the best little free utility to produce a basic CSS template that I have found online. This is nice and easy to use - with a really sweet colour slide to select colours. The CSS produced is spot on aswell.

As with all of these things you are left with a skeleton with which there will be alot of work in notepad / dreamweaver etc to get the site looking as you want. Once the template is finished the next step is to check that the site is working as it should.

The most obvious way to do this is check in a browser, in fact as many browsers as yo can find.

Then validate the code:

Start point is http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The way the web is going valid css xhtml is more and more important. I am one person who still uses tables, but I am slowly weening myself into the world of DIVs, SPANs and CSS

Next thing is to validate the site.

I have found that http://sitescore.silktide.com/ is fantastic for this. Not only does it validate your code, it checks for incomming links, checks your title tags and gives you a full report and score out of ten for your site. There are 130 tests performed on the site!

Results are cached for 30 days - so you cannot check, change, check every few hours when tweeking a site. You can register for an account - as a registered user you can generate reports at smaller time intervals,

This site is very strict so FOLLOW it’s advice.

January 31st, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, Web2.0, webdesign, css, valid html, xhtml | no comments