Likemind blog on web development

Tweetake is a new application I’ve been working on with Nikki Pilkington. It lets you back up data from Twitter: tweets, followers, favourites and friends. We think it’s very useful and we have plans to make it even better.

Since it was released a few days ago it’s had mixed publicity largely due to an error message that some users such as pixelbits were getting with depressing regularity. I looked into the error and now can report some interesting findings.

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Calling yourself Technorati is pretty brave, isn’t it? Every time you yourselves embark on anything vaguely technical, you’d better get it right, or you’ll look stupider than any ordinary mortal would.

So if you were going to send an email out to a list with thousands of bloggers on it, you wouldn’t make the reply-to address point to the list, would you? Otherwise anyone who replied to the email would have their reply - with their email address and other details in it - distributed to everyone else on the list. And that would be bad, and it would make you look foolish, too.

You wouldn’t make such an elementary error, would you, Technorati? Especially not in a mail portentously titled “Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere Survey”? Maybe somebody pretending to be you might make such a boob, but not you, O ever wise Technorati! Oh, the hubris!

Ann Smarty’s posts on Search Engine Journal are always worth a read, and this one is a great list of useful online tools for SEO.

Online SEO Tools - the Ultimate Collection
All tools listed below fall under the following criteria:

1. they are all useful for SEOs;
2. they are all web-based (no desk-top ones or FireFox extensions so far);
3. they are all free.

Read the rest of this article.
From Search Engine Journal.

I wrote this plugin to provide similar functionality to the Drupal Side Content module. It makes it easy to have unique sidebar content on any page. Yes, it gives your page wings - or its own widgets, anyway.

Read more about our Wordpress side content plugin

An online friend, Nikki Pilkington, was complaining on her Twitter feed yesterday about web designers who act obstructively:

fed up with web designers sabotaging my SEO by refusing FTP access and to upload vital files and changes

I’ve come across this too, when I’ve attempted in my own modest way to help with onsite SEO efforts. Why do it? I understand the desire to retain clients but not at gunpoint. If you act like this you will ensure your client (and the SEO consultant they’ve engaged) tell everyone they meet not to use your services as you don’t care about their needs, only your revenue stream.

I tried once before to raise consciousness of this issue, but it wants saying again. Those of us who don’t treat our customers this way should shout it loud and often.

Drupal is a lot easier to localize than it used to be, but it’s still hard work; partly because localization is intrinsically difficult, and partly because of flaws in the design of Drupal’s internationalization approach.

» more about Drupal localization ...

What is split testing? The short answer is that it is a comparison test of different versions of some content (on the web, typically a page). The different versions are compared by first showing them at random to users, then measuring success by some means, for example seeing how many lead to a purchase.

There is a split testing module for Drupal, but I think its scope is far too limited to be useful, as all it does is compare two different themes. If you are trying to test variants of some specific content - for example a call to action - rather than the way it is presented, then this module won’t help. (If you do want to measure one theme against another, of course, then it’s ideal.)

I have a partially developed solution of my own to the problem of testing variants on an individual content node, though there are some issues left to solve. One is to find a good answer to the question of caching, so the site as a whole is cached while the pages under test are either not cached at all, or cached in a way that permits different variants.

If anyone is interested in sponsoring further development, or taking over what I have written so far, please let me know. I’d also be interested in discussing other possible approaches, perhaps by using other tools such as Google Website Optimizer (mine is very Drupal specific - it works by altering the content of the node at load time).

There’s an interesting article by Brian Chappell in the latest Search Marketing Standard about Drupal and SEO. (Unfortunately you can’t read it online, so you’ll have to take my word for it!)

If you are thinking about onsite optimization for a Drupal web site, there’s one module you really must install, SEO Checklist. Although it doesn’t do very much in itself (it really is just a checklist, with some added smarts in that it does check which other modules you have installed against its list of recommendations), it provides an essential baseline.

My experience has been that those who commission and build Drupal sites are not always focussed on SEO, so the science is not quite as advanced as it is with WordPress, for example. There’s a prejudice in some parts of the industry against SEO which I suspect may also be partly responsible for the slight lag in this regard. Still, articles such as the one I mentioned above may help to shift the balance as SEO practitioners become more aware of the many fantastic possibilities that Drupal can offer.

This is simply a wish list of functions I’d like to see in a Drupal contact management module. I may well be turning at least some of these into code if I don’t find someone else has already done it - in either case I’ll write a new post and link back here. Comments are very welcome.

• The ability to manage contacts who aren’t system users (as well as ones that are). Contacts might have only a phone number or snail mail address initially.
• Flexibility in adding custom fields. I anticipate the answer to this will be to use CCK.
• Fexibility in querying. Is there a way to generate views dynamically? I haven’t yet investigated. An interactive query builder would be ideal.
• Ability to raise an action (such as “cold call”) against a set of contacts and record progress.
• Per-contact action log.
• Flexible status indication with colour-coding.

(Yes, I do know about CiviCRM, and I don’t like it. It is so hard to customise it might as well be closed-source proprietary software, in my experience.)

Last week I got the idea for a site where people could post pictures of mysterious things and ask for, or provide, an explanation. So I set to work and within a few hours there it was: Knowthings.co.uk, everyday mysteries.

It’s a good example of how a Drupal site can be built very quickly if the needs are simple. It uses the celju theme with one or two small modifications to fix cross-browser issues.

The whole thing cost very little - £6.56 to register the domain name, plus about 3 hours of my time, plus some hosting space and bandwidth on a package I’d already paid for. If it starts attracting hordes of visitors - which I doubt, to be honest - then I’ll put ads on it and maybe it’ll pay for itself. It was fun to do, anyway.

Have you an idea for a site which could be done as quickly?