Welcome to my corner of the web. Here you'll find my ramblings about faith, church, drupal, Geeks and God (my podcast), and my other unrelated interests.

While you can subscribe to all posts here from the Subscribe link on the right, there are two other main feeds. There is the drupal and other technology feed along with the faith and church feed.

tech

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Build Your Own Search Engine

Posted on: Tue, 2006-08-08 09:32 | By: matt | In:

Yahoo! made the power of search available on a personal level. This is direct competition against startups like Rollyo.

What is the Yahoo Search Builder?

The Yahoo! Search Builder is a site that will let anyone build their own search engine using the Yahoo Search Technology. The different types of searches one can setup are a web search, a news search, and an individual website search.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Designing a Logo

Posted on: Tue, 2006-07-25 09:35 | By: matt | In:

Designing a website that doesn't suck is never easy. Designing a logo that doesn't suck is just downright hard. I rarely make an attempt at a logo design, but when I do everyone I know who has an eye for quality gets a copy in hopes they tell me it looks good or can give me a few ways to tweak it.

At the same time, to create quality work one needs to be in the presence of quality work. To learn from, to bounce designs off of, and for inspiration.

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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.

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Track Blog and Forum Discussions with Commentful

Posted on: Fri, 2006-07-14 08:23 | By: matt | In:

There's a new web app on the block that is bound to make your Internet socializing easier. Following up on forum and blog comments can be a pain and consume more than its share of time. That's where commentful comes into play. Commentful streamlines your Internet conversation tracking.