drupal

Quick Drupal Speed Tip

Posted on: Fri, 2006-11-17 15:08 | By: matt | In:

It's been awhile since I have talked tech on my blog. So, today I decided to give a quick tip to speed up drupal since several of my readers run their own blogs with drupal.

Drupal has a caching system. What this caching system does is take a page, such as your homepage, and stores the html that makes us that page in the database. Then when an anonymous visitor comes to your site, rather then recreate the page with all it's database queries and calculation, the page the visitor sees is pulled from the cache with one quick database query.

The page loads really really fast for an anonymous user and when a user is logged in they still can see all of their customizations. And, when a page is updated with comments or changes to the page the cache is updated, too.

To enable caching go to /admin/settings on your site. Then, under the heading 'Cache settings' choose enabled. If you are running a smaller site you should be able to run the site with 'Minimum cache lifetime' set to none.

There are many tweaks and modules meant to speed up drupal and even more in the upcoming version but this is one of the basics and it works like a charm.

3 comments

Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog - Part 3

Posted on: Thu, 2006-08-03 10:17 | By: matt | In:

Over the past year many of my friends have setup great blogs. Not just self serving blogs, but blogs that are worthy of getting out beyond our circle of friends. One of the best ways for not only search engines to pick up on the posts better but for readers to navigate a blog better is with pretty URLs. A pretty URL is one that looks something like /2006/08/01/this-is-my-post. In drupal and wordpress this is not native.

Picture Moblogging with flickr and drupal

Posted on: Wed, 2006-08-02 10:31 | By: matt | In:

Picture moblogging is one of the easiest and most addictive things one can do with their camera phone. Building a moblog with flickr is one of the easiest ways to go. After listening to the G&G minicast on moblogging with flickr I decided to set one up.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog - Part 2.5

Posted on: Tue, 2006-08-01 17:53 | By: matt | In:

Drupal and Wordpress both have dynamic ways to generate the keywords, description, and other meta tags I talked about in part 2. Here is a quick rundown on those plugins and modules:

For wordpress there are a number of plugins to do this for you. Being someone who doesn't use wordpress for anything advanced I can't make any recommendations but you can find a list here. If anyone has any recommendations please let us know.

Drupal doesn't have a million modules to do this. There is just one and that's all you need. The module is called Node (Key)words. This module will let you set global and node specific keywords.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog - Part 2

Posted on: Tue, 2006-08-01 16:12 | By: matt | In:

Meta tags are an important part of any site. Even though the meta information is not part of the content a user sees, the meta tags are important for you to get your content ranked higher and more accurately in search engines. Meta tags go inside the <head>. The typical place for them is just following the </title> tag.

This is one of the easiest ways to optimize your code for search engines.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog - Part 1

Posted on: Mon, 2006-07-31 20:53 | By: matt | In:

Finding good blog posts is difficult. It's not that they aren't out there, they are. It's that many aren't rising to the top in those pesky search engines. But, for those of you with good blogs that could use a boost in the search engines here are a few Search Engine Optimization Tips.

Search Engine 101

Before we get into how to optimize your blog, let's talk about the basics of what a search engine does. We usually see the end result of a lot of work when we go to a site like google or yahoo, enter our search terms, and search for results. Before you can preform a search a search engine is going to do a few things. First, search engines crawl your site. This is where spiders (a.k.a bots) scour the web and look at the code. Next, the search engines index the pages they crawled. So, if your page isn't crawled then it won't be indexed. In indexing, the search engine stores the code that is your page in a database for quick and easy access. After the content is indexed, your pages will be ranked for certain key words depending on your URLs, content, and code. If someone else optimized their code better than you, they will get a better ranking than you. Finally, search engines process requests for key words and generate a list based on ranking.

Blogging with Drupal

Posted on: Wed, 2006-07-26 08:22 | By: matt | In:

A few weeks ago the task came up to redo this blog. Because of the plan to wipe out all of the old entries, the time had come to choose a blogging engine. The slate was clean. After playing around with a few packages, including wordpress, drupal rose to the top. The choice was based on my skill level with drupal over the others. Sure, some of the other packages may be better suited for just blogging, but since making the change was about time, effort, and ease the choice quickly became obvious to run with drupal.

Setting up this blog led me to configuration that was slightly different from the other sites I had done with drupal. Here is a quick rundown on the configuration used for this drupal blog:

Drupal Tip: Favicons (also applies for other sites)

Posted on: Tue, 2006-07-18 08:29 | By: matt | In:

Favicons are a staple of the modern web. The newer versions of every major browser support them and they are just another way for web designers to further customize the sites they design.

If you don't know what I am talking about, favicons are the little (16px by 16px) images that show up on the tabs of a web page (if you have a tabbed browser), show up in the address bar next to the address, and even show up in your bookmarks/favorites. Firefox, Safari, Opera, and even the newest version of IE support them.

To do them in drupal with the PHPTemplate engine is relatively easy.

IBM Teaches Website Design, Development, and Deployment with Drupal

Posted on: Thu, 2006-07-13 13:05 | By: matt | In:

The news is out. IBM is teaching how to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative web site using Drupal. Most of the attention I have read so far has been focused on the fact that they chose Drupal over others like Mambo, Typo3, and Ruby on Rails (to name a few).

While, this is a big win for the Drupal community and several people have already written about it (check here and here), that is not what interests me most about what IBM is doing.

What interests me is that IBM senior developers are teaching, through a series of articles, how to "design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site."

Removing the (not verified) for Anonymous Users in Drupal

Posted on: Thu, 2006-07-13 11:03 | By: matt | In:

Update: This method works but it's not the right way or a good way to do this. Check out my post here for details on a more maintainable way that's also the drupal way.

When I relaunced my blog a week ago it was with a fresh drupal install and a new sytle setup. Under this setup I decided, for the time being, that the majority of commenters would an anonymous. To hold their info so they wouldn't have to type it every time I installed the Comment Info module.

After the first few comments were up on the site I noticed that after every one, not by me, there were the words (not verified). I didn't want that after every posters name so I decided to remove it, but that's where the problem began. I did some searching to see if anyone had done it already and found a drupal issue and blog post that offered fixes. But, these don't work in Drupal 4.7. The structure has been changed enough so the same files aren't affected in the change. After some digging here is a fix: