Run Drupal

Anyone who has been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for a very long knows that what you title your web pages is very important. To get a little technical, since there can be some confusion, when I refer to Page Titles I mean what is between the <title> and </title> tags in the heading portion of a web page. This is the title that shows at the top of your web browser when visiting a page.

Often I find myself working with my Drupal sites to install add-on modules in order to add some functionality I need or want. In the past the way I did this was by first downloading the module I wanted to my local computer, unzipping it, and then uploading it to my web server that hosts  my Drupal site.

Well I finally got around to upgrading to Drupal 6. Luckily everything went very smooth. While I was upgrading I also began consolidating all my different Drupal sites into a mult-site configuration. I am very much enjoying this as I don't have to update each site individually. I'll let you know how it goes in the long run. We'll see if its as much of a time saver as I think it is.

I also started using some of the new Drupal 6 modules so I should be able to include some very handy tutorials very soon.

I launched another a Drupal website this weekend. This one for my wife. Over the past few months she has started a business that needed an e-commerce site. This gave me the perfect chance to try out ubercart and all of Druapl's online shopping accessories. With this Canyon Creek Bags was launched! It made it very easy to launch a great site when your wife is a Graphic Designer! We utilized a custom theme that she designed and I implemented in CSS and PHPTemplate.

My Experience With Linode

A while back I decided to make the jump from shared hosting to a VPS. Shared hosting has many draw backs. The biggest of which is that most shared hosting places throw you on a box with 100's of other websites. If anyone of those sites has something go wrong many times it causes your site to crash or be inaccessible. Running a Drupal site I had this happen many times. Someone else would hammer the MySQL database and it would make my site not work.

I love to know who's visiting my site, where from, and what they are looking at. Its interesting information in and of itself but it also helps greatly when adding advertisements to your site. Another thing I like to look at is how many people are using FireFox versus that other internet browser

Google has a great free service called Google Analytics. All you have to do is sign up for the service and then you can have a fairly high quality visitor tracking service. Here's how you get your Drupal site set up with Google Analytics.

I just switched rundrupal.com over from a shared hosting plan to a VPS through Linode. It costs a little more but I get full control over the server and the uptime should be much better. Unless I don't do a good job setting everything up. I'll be giving updates on this site as to how the process goes. Right now I have this website running well on it and I'm in the process of getting all the email stuff set up. Here's hoping that all works out.

Today I launched my new theme for this site. It is a modified version of a the CrystalX design from open source web designs. I broke it up and made it fit for Drupal. Then I added a bunch of changes and tweaks that fit with my style and what I wanted for this site. I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out.

When setting up a Tiny MCE profile you can specify what CSS settings to use. By default it uses your themes CSS settings. This is nice, because then as you add text it truly is WYSIWYG. The problem is if you have a colored or picture background in your theme. For example on this site I have a background image but all my content is displayed on a white background. However, TinyMCE will not display a white background when typing instead it will display a gradiant.