Padizine Blog

Schizophrenic Brush – Le Ballon Rouge

Alex Petrisor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:05:55 +0000

For those not familiar with Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon), it’s a short fantasy French film from 1956. It has won numerous awards including an Oscar and a Palme d’Or, and it follows the adventures of a young boy who one day finds a sentient, mute, red balloon.

The red balloon follows the boy (Pascal) through the streets of Paris, and together they overcome several obstacles. Near the end, a group of bullies, jealous of Pascal’s new friend, manage to pop the balloon with a slingshot. It collapses to the ground, deflates and dies. After that, an army of multicoloured balloons gather from all across Paris and surround Pascal, and in an attempt to cheer him up, they pick him up in the sky and take him on an amazing ride above the city. I’m sure that you recognize this image from *cough* recent TV commercials and films.

Our brief was to create a summary of the film, without leaving the studio, and in under 8 hours. This is our interpretation of the story. Watch it, and I’ll give you some more explanations afterwards.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, as you’ve probably guessed, the paintbrush represents Pascal and the green paint represents the balloon. They have a great journey together, several objects try to stop them, to a point where another brush wants to steal the green life-force.

We saw the film as a dance between the boy and the balloon, where initially the boy has the lead, only to let the balloon take full control nearing the end. After all the green paint dries down and the paintbrush drops lifelessly, a refreshing rain of colour brings life to the story again and takes the paintbrush to whole new heights.

Don’t be shy, share your thoughts with us.

Awesome H2O Car Wallpaper – Iphone to HD

Cosmina — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:57 +0000

Testing… testing… 1-2-3. *cough* Hello, and let me tell you how proud I am to be one of the privileged few to… NO really, I’m Cosmina, pleased to meet you. As this is my first post on the Padizine Blog, I knew I had to impress, to gain the trust of the people, YOU.

Recently I’ve been watching Rome (amazing series by the way) and well, I think that Caesar hit the nail dead on the head. People always love free stuff don’t they? So here it is, my gift to you, a brand new awesome H2O Car wallpaper in all shapes and sizes! Enjoy and see you around Oh! Before you go ahead remember: my next article will be a tutorial on how exactly I did this thing, so stay tuned!

Download here:

iphone 1024×768 1280×800 1280×1024 1440×900 1600×1200 1680×1050 1920×1080 1920×1200

Licence

This work by Padizine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

What that means is that this wallpaper is free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. You can modify it as long as you keep the same licence.

Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO With Meta Tags

Alex Petrisor — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:49:10 +0000

Today we will be covering another important SEO topic: Meta Tags. So what are meta tags exactly? Well, they are tags, but not just any normal tags. They are invisible tags! These tags add additional information about the current page, that search engines can use to your advantage. Your users won’t see anything different on your pages at all, but spiders will see quite a bit more. We will be referring to 2 of these meta tags today: Description and Keywords.

The Description Meta Tag

If you recall the last tutorial (Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO With Page Titles) you will remember how I said that search engines list your page’s title in the search results, and that’s why it was so important for SEO. But also, when you do a search, there is some additional text right under the main title. And that usually is the description. It is very important to have meaningful descriptions that actually tell the visitor what the page is about, but what you need to pay extra attention to is that you don’t have any duplicate descriptions (multiple pages with the same description). Keep your descriptions smart and informative, but don’t exceed 150 chars, as most engines will not display more than that.

All meta tags need to be placed inside your html tag. The description meta tag for this page looks like this:

meta name=”description” content=”A descriptive guide on how to optimize meta tags (description and keywords) for search engines, using Drupal 6 and the Nodewords module.”

Imagine that you would have to manage it like that for each and every one of your pages. That would be a pain. Luckily the Nodewords module is here to save the day. Get it here, upload it to your server and activate Nodewords, and Nodewords – basic meta tags. Now go to Administer > Content Management > Meta Tags.

The first option lets you choose what tags will the users be able to alter on the node edit page.

If you are logged in with the admin account, you will always see all the tags on the edit page. So, depending on what kind of users you have on your website, you may want to change this to fit your needs. However, if you do decide to change it, don’t forget to set up the proper permissions at Administer > User Management > Permissions.

Next we choose which tags actually get placed in our tag on our pages:

That’s about all you need to do for now. You can also set some default values for your tags, but I don’t recommend it, as you will need to write specific information related to the current page anyway. If your home page is not a node though, you can set its tags in the Default and specific meta tags section. Now you can start editing your nodes to your heart’s content!

What keywords should I pick?

This has been a pretty debated topic in the past, and since google doesn’t care about them, most people just ignore them. Truth is, other smaller engines still use them. Apparently Yahoo ditched them as well, but after a closer inspection it turned out that they haven’t removed them completely, but have greatly decreased their importance.

However, you should still properly research your keywords and strategically place them inside your page title,

,

tags, and description. A good way to find good targeted keywords for your page is by using the Google Keyword Tool. There you can write your own keywords, and you will get a full list of suggestions, accompanied by search statistics and advertiser competition. The best keywords that you can pick have a high number of monthly searches, but a small advertiser competition.

If you are feeling uninspired with your keywords, you can even type in your page URL, and then google will examine it for you, and find some suggestions based on your content.

After you pick your keywords and place them accordingly throughout your content, you can also add them to the keywords meta tag. I usually use 5 to 7 keywords there. But remember, only use keywords that are actually in your page’s content.

That’s it for meta tags for today. I hope that this was as useful as you expected it to be If not, please share your thoughts below.

35 Drupal Modules That You Absolutely Need

Alex Petrisor — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:14:40 +0000

If you are just starting out with Drupal, then the module repository will be a little overwhelming, with literally thousands of modules to choose from. That is why I have created this list of vital modules, to help you. A big part of these modules will be needed on all the Drupal websites that you will create, while some are more targeted (e-commerce for example). I have divided the modules into the following categories: content, images, SEO, utils, social, newsletters, e-commerce and extras. Every link will open up in a new window and take you to the module’s page. I have included information about each module, and if interested you will find everything you need on its page. Ready? Here we go!

Content

1. CCK (Content Construction Kit)

This is so good that it will go into Drupal 7 Core. It basically allows you to add custom fields to node types.

2. Views

I cannot imagine a Drupal installation without Views. This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. You will need Views if:

You like the default front page view, but you find you want to sort it differently.
You want a way to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type.
You want to create a photo gallery.

3. FileField

FileField provides a universal file upload field for CCK. It is a robust alternative to core’s Upload module and an absolute must for users uploading a large number of files. Great for managing video and audio files for podcasts on your own site.

4. ImageField

ImageField provides an image upload field for CCK. It boasts features such as multiple images per node, resolution restrictions, default images, and extensive Views support. You will definitely need this if you plan on having Image-type nodes.

5. WYSIWYG

It might be ok for you to write code in the node body, but for your client it’s not. That’s why you use WYSIWYG editors such as TinyMCE or FCKEditor. This module makes integration with such editors a breeze, and no other module is required. You can even assign a different editor for each input format!

6. Dynamic Display Block

Need a big showcase of your recent work on your homepage? Or maybe just a slideshow that highlights the most important aspects of your site? Then this module is for you. It simply creates an attractive block that cycles through certain nodes. Use it in conjunction with Views for best results.

Images

7. ImageCache

ImageCache allows you to setup presets for image processing. These presets will scale, crop, rotate and do about anything that you would need to your images. It will then save the new images in designated folders for later use.

8. ImageAPI

This provides an API other modules can leverage. Currently GD2 and ImageMagick support are distributed with ImageAPI. Basically you will need this for ImageCache to work, so just install it

9. Lightbox2

Everybody should know what this is, but just in case: It is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to set-up and works on most modern browsers. This translates into: when people click on your image thumbnails, instead of being taken to the image node, the screen goes dark and the image pops up at full size. You can cycle through images, make slideshows, and it works great with ImageCache by using the presets defined there.

10. IMCE

IMCE is an image/file uploader and browser that supports personal directories and quota. You will need this is you plan on uploading and managing images directly from your WYSIWYG editor, and you will also need…

11. IMCE WYSIWYG Bridge

This module acts as a bridge between the IMCE module and the WYSIWYG module.

SEO

12. Pathauto

This is highly recommended as it creates nice URLs automatically for you, whenever you create new content. It does that based on several things like title, taxonomy, content type, and username. To be honest this will work out-of-the-box, but in case you want a more granular control over the URL structure you can easily change that in the module’s settings. You can find an in-depth tutorial on this module here: Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO For URLs

13. Nodewords

This project allows you to set the meta tags for each Drupal node. Description, Keywords, Copyright, etc. with really detailed settings and great control, definitely a must-have. You can find an in-depth tutorial on this module here: Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO With Meta Tags

14. XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap module creates a sitemap that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines crawl your website better and keep their results up to date. The sitemap created by the module can be automatically submitted to Ask, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines.

15. Global Redirect

This module addresses one important SEO issue: canonicalization of your URLs. What that means is that it makes sure that for each piece of content you have, there is one URL and one URL only. These are some of the things it does:

Removes trailing slashes from URLs (“/”)
Permanently redirects any requests for content using the non-clean URL format
Permanently redirects any requests that refer to the homepage, but use something other than the canonical URL for the homepage address.
Permanently redirects any requests for content where the case of the requested URL does not match the case of the canonical URL.

You can find an in-depth tutorial on this module here: Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO For URLs

16. Page Title

This is pretty straightforward but overly underestimated. It gives you granular control over the page title. You can specify patterns for how the title should be structured and, on content creation pages, specify the page title separately to the content’s title. You can find an in-depth tutorial on this module here: Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO With Page Titles.

17. Google Analytics

Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website, and much more:

Selectively track certain users, roles and pages
Monitor what type of links are tracked (downloads, outgoing and mailto)
Monitor what files are downloaded from your pages
Cache the Google Analytics code on your local server for improved page loading times

Utils

18. Token

Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and expose their own token values. Many other modules rely on these variables, so you will definitely want this on a fresh install.

19. Administration Menu

Let’s face it, the Drupal back-end theme is not that great. And for your clients, it will seem extremely complicated. Have no fear! Administration Menu is here to save face. What it does is that it places a small horizontal menu on the top of your page, that has everything that you need and more, organized in a clean and clever way.

20. JQuery Update

This module facilitates an upgrade of jQuery in Drupal core and allows other modules to rely on a newer jQuery version (i.e. Dynamic Display Block).

21. Captcha

We all hate spam. But unless we do something about it, just hating it won’t get us through the day. Captcha is that something. This module allows users to provide a captcha in a number of places on your site such as comments, nodes and other commonly used forms. It will show the user an image with random text to input or a question that they must answer in order to submit the form.

Social

22. AddThis Button

This provides an addthis.com button to let your users share your content to social network sites. This simple yet powerful button is very easy to install and provides valuable analytics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of your users.

23. Twitter

Twitter is getting bigger and bigger. Many sites have started incorporating twitter into their designs even if they aren’t blogs. In fact, it could add a lot of momentum to a static website because it gives the impression of constant updates and maintenance. Out of the box, it allow users to:

Associate one or more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account.
Have their tweets displayed in a sidebar block or on their user profile.
Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content.

Newsletters

24. Simplenews

Simplenews publishes and sends newsletters to lists of subscribers. Both anonymous and authenticated users can opt-in to different mailing lists. HTML email can be sent by adding Mime Mail module.

25. Mime Mail

This allows other modules to send HTML emails. ‘Nuff Said!

E-Commerce

26. Ubercart

The leading e-commerce solution for Drupal. Get it. Use it. Love it. It’s a great solution for stores that sell physical goods, digital product downloads, and site memberships.

27. Secure Pages

If you have an on-line shop, then you know how important security is. Especially for your customers. This module simply redirects the required pages to a SSL version (like checkout, user details, orders, etc.) 28. Ubercart Addresses This module adds support for one or more addresses in the user’s profile. When users register, you can require that they provide an address. Users can then add more addresses and edit or delete existing ones. This really speeds up the checkout process for registered users.

29. Ubercart Discount Coupons

This module allows Ubercart store owners to provide discount coupons for use during checkout. Coupons can discount either a fixed price or a percentage of the order total. You have a vast amount of settings to fine-tune this to your liking.

30. Terms of Use

This module adds a Terms of Use node and an “I agree” check box to the registration page. Being a node, you can easily link to it anywhere inside your website.

Extras

31. LoginTobbogan

LoginTobaggan is a great module that provides some very useful user features. With this module you can allow your users to login to your site with their email address or their username. You can also allow for various other options like allowing people to sign in automatically or choose their password instantly while signing up. Another very handy module.

32. Webform

This module adds a webform nodetype to your Drupal site. Typical uses for Webform are questionnaires, contact or request/register forms, surveys or polls. Webform includes some simple statistical tools to help in form design and evaluation and also allows the whole table to be downloaded as a csv file for detailed statistical analysis.

33. Date

The date module is a flexible date/time field type for CCK. You will need it for…

34. Calendar

This module will display any Views date field in calendar formats, including CCK date fields. Switch between year, month, and day views. Back and next navigation is provided for all views.

35. Site Map

Do you need a sitemap? No, not an xml sitemap. Just a plain old sitemap! This module provides a site map that gives visitors an overview of your site (basically a nice list with links to all your content). It can also display the RSS feeds for all blogs and categories.

Phew, man that was a long list.

I hope that this will help you unlock Drupal’s true potential. At least it will get you started. If you have any modules that you would like featured here, just tell me a name and give a short description, and you might get lucky.

Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO With Page Titles

Alex Petrisor — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:46:16 +0000

As promised in my previous Drupal SEO tutorial, part 2 of the series has arrived! Today we will be talking about the importance of page titles for SEO, and how to set them up properly for Drupal 6 by using the Page Title module.

What are page titles and why do you want to change them

Whenever you browse to a website, if you look at the top of the browser window you will see a title. This is called the page title and you can find it in your HTML file under the tag, inside </strong>. Everyone is probably aware of this, but the really important part is this: <strong>The page title that you set in that tag is what shows up in google search results.</strong> So if someone searches google (or any other search engine) for <em>evil monkey</em>, and I have a page called <em>“</em><em>Evil Monkey 101 – Chewbacca goes to Holywood!”</em> that’s exactly how it will show up in the results. Thus, your page title is your first interaction with your visitor, and will probably determine whether he will click on the link or not. That is why we need to take full control of our page titles and turn them into useful and meaningful phrases.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">1</span>Taking control of the page titles in Drupal</h2> <p>Yep, you guessed it, we will need a module for this. And the name of this module is none other than… <strong>Page Title</strong>. You need to download it right <a title="Page Title Module" rel="external nofollow" href="http://drupal.org/project/page_title" target="_blank">here</a>, and then upload it to your Drupal installation inside the <em>/sites/all/modules</em> folder, then go to <strong>Administer > Site Building > Modules</strong>, and under the <strong>Other</strong> category enable <strong>Page Title</strong>. You will also need the <strong>Token</strong> module for this to work, and if you don’t already have it you can find it <a title="Token Module" rel="external nofollow" href="http://drupal.org/project/token" target="_blank">here</a>.</p> <p>After that, you can manage the Page Title module settings at <strong>Administer > Content Management > Page Titles</strong>. Once there, you will be able to set a bunch of presets for your titles, depending on content type or taxonomy. This is where the Token module comes in handy, because it allows you to use a set of replaceable patterns. If you click on the <strong>Available Tokens List</strong> you will see a big list of variables. You can use any of these variables in your title patterns and they will automatically be replaced with the correct text. For example, if I use the token <strong>[nid]</strong>, that will be replaced with the Node ID of the current node that I am viewing.</p> <p>The Default field is mandatory. Let’s say that its value is <strong>[page-title] – [site-name]</strong>, and that my site’s name is <em>“</em><em>Chewbacca goes to Holywood!”</em>. If I browse to a node called <em>“</em><em>Chewy”</em>, then the title at the top of the browser will be <em>“</em><em>Chewy – Chewbacca goes to Holywood!”</em>. Why does it do that? Because Drupal sets the page title equal to the node title by default. After that, the Page Title module steps in and appends the <em>“</em><em>- Chewbacca goes to Holywood!”</em>. But you can change how Drupal handles things in the remaining fields on the Page Title options page. You can set a specific preset to a specific content type, to a specific taxonomy vocabulary, or to the user profile.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">2</span>So what are the best titles for SEO?</h2> <p>Good question. People say a lot of things. Some say stuff them with keywords, others say keep them as descriptive as possible. I will tell you what I think and what has worked for me in the past. The problem with many websites is that usually the title is exactly the same as the node title, which is usually (or should be anyway) represented by a <strong><h1></strong> tag. Now if you think about it for a second, and think about how google works and how it has evolved over the past years, it doesn’t take much to realize that spamming keywords won’t do you any good.</p> <p>First of all, you will need to have a meaningful title that will grab attention, but at the same time is deeply connected to the content on the specific page. Otherwise, even if people get to your site, they will leave in a matter of seconds. Secondly, the node title (and thus the <h1> tag) will have to be different (by using synonyms) and in some cases, even more descriptive. For example, the node title for this tutorial is <em>“</em><em>Drupal 6 tutorial – SEO with page titles”</em>, and it clearly describes what this page is all about. On the other hand, the page title is <em>“How to optimize Drupal 6 page titles for search engines</em><em>“</em>. Why is that? Well I have simply replaced the word <em>“SEO”</em> with <em>“optimize for search engines” </em>to add in a few extra keywords. In addition to that, the words <em>“How to”</em> are widely used in searches when people are looking for tutorials, or simply answers to questions. I still kept <em>“Drupal 6</em>” and <em>“page titles”</em> though, as this is what this tutorial is actually about.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">3</span>Setting custom titles for specific pages</h2> <p>If you want to take the approach described above, you will need even more control on your titles. On the <strong>Page Titles</strong> options page, you will see a column called <strong>Show Field</strong>. It places a checkbox next to all the content types and vocabularies that you have. If you tick that box, next time you edit a node of that content type, under the Title, you will get a new field called <strong>Page Title</strong>. Change that to your custom title and you’re good to go! But don’t forget, if in the Default field you had something like <strong>[page-title] – [site-name]</strong>, then the site name will be added after your custom title. It is up to you if you want to keep or remove this.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">4</span>Conclusion and best practices</h2> <p>Page titles play an incredible role in on-site SEO, but many people often underestimate <em>“</em><em>the little text at the top of the browser that nobody cares about”</em>. I hope that at least now, you are not one of them any more. If so, there are two more things that you need to remember when writing your titles:</p> <ol> <li>Most search engines use a maximum of 60 characters per title, so for the extra zealous ones: keep it short.</li> <li>Be careful with duplicate titles. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, so make sure that you double check your titles and that they are all unique.</li> </ol> <p>That’s it for today, I hope that you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, and if you have <a title="Comment on this" href="#respond">anything to add</a> about Drupal, SEO, Page Titles or the philosophy of life, you are more then welcome. Next time we will be talking about descriptions and keywords, so stay tuned!</p> </article> <article> <h1>The Body Language Film</h1> <p>Alex Petrisor — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:20:56 +0000</p> <p>Wikipedia says: “<em>Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, consisting of body pose, gestures, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals subconsciously.</em>”</p> <p>But what if it is more than that? What if it’s some sort of empathic connection that links us to everyone around us? The human brain is still one of the biggest mysteries of mankind, so <strong>what if</strong> there is more to this then meets the eye? At least that’s what we thought when we got this brief.</p> <p>Just like dogs communicate through scent, ants through pheromones and dolphins through sound waves, what if we possess an instrument that is much more powerful than our vocal cords, if trained and used properly? Understanding body language is by no means a trivial task, but once you get to master it, you will see the world with different eyes.</p> <p><p><a href="http://www.padizine.com/blog/the-body-language-film/"><em>Click here to view the embedded video.</em></a></p><br /> Our take on it was that body language is actually your inner spirit interacting with the people around you and their spirits. And thus, if you understood and connected to your inner self, you could read others like open books. Our goal was not to impose our opinion on the viewer, but just slightly hint that body language is much more important than people make it to be. We have also achieved this by showing the main character (Shibly Alawi) smoking what seems to be a joint in the opening, as to give an explanation to the surreal feel of the film. However, at the end of the film, when he finds the scarf on the bench, the viewers are again hinted that this <strong>might</strong> be actually true.</p> <p>Due to unexpected events, we had to film with a regular Canon 15 fps photo-camera. This bummed us a bit, but we had a great time filming it, and in the end it turned out better than I expected.<br /> We would love to hear what you <a title="Comment on this" href="#respond">have to say</a> about our take on body language.</p> </article> <article> <h1>10 Free Social Icons – Black Balls</h1> <p>Alex Petrisor — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:35:28 +0000</p> <p>Today I am proud to release my first icon pack and the first freebie (from many to come) on the <a title="Padizine Blog" href="http://www.padizine.com/blog/">Padizine Blog</a>.</p> <h3>Everybody likes icons.</h3> <p>Also, everybody likes social networking (well… almost everybody).</p> <p>If I assume that <strong>2 x like = love</strong> than I can safely say that you are gonna love this:</p> <p></p> <h3>Licence</h3> <p>This work by <a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.padizine.com">Padizine</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License</a>.</p> <p>What that means is that this pack is free to use in commercial and non-commercial projects. You can modify it as long as you keep the same licence.</p> <p>All icons are 256×256 PNG files with transparency. You can download it right here:</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.padizine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/freebies/padizine_social_balls.zip"></a></p> <p style="text-align: left;"> </article> <article> <h1>Creative writing: National Hero Returns Home!</h1> <p>Alex Petrisor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:59:05 +0000</p> <p>Winston Churchill, the war correspondent that has been held captive in Pretoria has escaped after two months of imprisonment! After fleeing for 300 miles just to rejoin the war effort, now, 1 year later, he has returned to the Island. Difficult as it was, we’ve managed to hold an interview with this young yet resourceful man.</p> <p><strong>Interviewer:</strong> <em>How did you escape?</em><br /> <strong>Winston:</strong> Friday night used to be the night when hookers came to visit the guards. They used to take turns, so us prisoners weren’t left unattended. One Friday, this massive argument started between two guards fighting about who would go first. Being drunk as well, the whole thing escalated to a major “settling things like men” kind of thing. In the midst of the fiasco, I took my clothes off, urinated on them, tightly tied them around two bars, and started spinning them so that the bars would bend. I did that on a second pair of bars, got out, and then ran for my life butt-naked.</p> <p><strong>Interviewer:</strong> <em>What happened after that?</em><br /> <strong>Winston:</strong> I managed to hide in a train that was transporting sheep to Mozambique. The smell was horrific, and you can imagine that they were pretty agitated because of the noise the train made. But I tell you, I had never felt happier in my whole life. The train stopped in Clewer and I decided to knock on some doors and ask for help. Fortune was definitely on my side as the door that I knocked on was John Howard’s. You can imagine the reaction that he had, having a naked man dressed up in sheep poo knocking on his door in the middle of the night.</p> <p><strong>Interviewer:</strong> <em>Yes I can imagine he had quite the shock!</em><br /> <strong>Winston:</strong> Indeed. After that I hid in the underground stables of the mine for six days. When I left for Mozambique, I thanked Howard for saving my life, and he told me something that I will never forget: “You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.”</p> <p><strong>Interviewer:</strong> <em>As a last question, I am really curious why you chose the front line, the trenches.</em><br /> <strong>Winston:</strong> I was stuck with the Grenadier Guards, who were all dry and drank only tea and condensed milk. Being a scotch man myself, and alcohol being permitted in the front lines, it was an obvious choice for me. I have a saying: “If you are going through hell, keep going”. Sometimes you need someone to remind you of that and for me, that someone is Johnny Walker.</p> <p><strong>Interviewer:</strong> <em>Thank you for your time, I hope your adventures take a less dangerous path from now on.</em><br /> <strong>Winston:</strong> Thank you, it’s good to be home.</p> <p style="text-align: right;">8’th of May, 1900. Interview taken by Alex Petrisor.</p> <p>Churchill fan? <a title="Comment on this" href="#respond">Tell us</a> what you thought about this story then!</p> </article> <article> <h1>SWFAddress Tutorial For ActionScript 2.0</h1> <p>Alex Petrisor — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:56:35 +0000</p> <p>Recently I’ve been working on my portfolio at <a title="Padizine Online Portfolio" href="http://www.padizine.com" target="_blank">padizine.com</a> which is a full Flash AS2 website. It is still WIP, but I knew that I had to do something from a SEO point of view. Flash SEO has always been a big controversy, even after the changes that google brought to <a title="Improved Flash Indexing" rel="external nofollow" href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html" target="_blank">flash indexing</a>, but there are some tricks that work well. The first thing that I did was to get deep linking working. What’s <a title="Deep Linking" rel="external nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking" target="_blank">deep linking</a> you ask? Well keep on reading!</p> <h2>What deep linking is and how it can help you.</h2> <p>Well normally for any flash website you would have a Flash SWF file embedded in a HTML page. Whenever a visitor clicks on a link in the menu and is taken to a different page in your site, the actual HTML page and thus the URL doesn’t change. The change is made within the Flash SWF and the user is taken to a different zone within the timeline, or a different page is shown through ActionScript. That means that however many pages your flash site will have, you will only have one URL address. This causes quite a few disadvantages:</p> <ul> <li>If someone presses the browser back button while deep in your page hierarchy, he will be taken to the page visited prior to your homepage, as there is no history entry for your individual pages.</li> <li>That also means that visitors can only bookmark your homepage.</li> <li>And that also means that you can only have one HTML <title> that will stay the same regardless of what page the visitor is on.</li> </ul> <p>Deep linking solves all these problems beautifully. All the pages inside your Flash file will generate different URLs, and have different titles. Because of that they will also create history entries in the browser, and the user will be able to use the back and forward buttons on your site. Finally, you can supply visitors with links that take them directly to an area inside your site. Flash SEO has been waiting for this for years. Too good to be true? It’s actually not, but you have to admit that it’s damn sweet.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">1</span>Preparing your HTML by using swfaddress.js</h2> <p>So how is this possible? Well by using a great tool called <strong>SWFAddress</strong>, thanks to the awesome folks at <a title="Asual.com" rel="external nofollow" href="http://www.asual.com/" target="_blank">Asual.com</a>. To get started, you will need to download SWFAddress <a title="SWFAddress" rel="external nofollow" href="http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/" target="_blank">here</a>.</p> <p>After you extract the files, you will see a folder called <strong>dist</strong>. This is the distribution folder and it contains all the files that we will need. First, browse to <strong>dist\js</strong> and copy <strong>swfaddress.js</strong> to the root folder of your website, where index.html is. I assume that you are using SWFObject to load the flash into the HTML.</p> <p>In your <strong><head></strong>, right after<br /> <div class="fancy_box"><script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfobject.js” charset=”utf-8″></script></div>add<br /> <div class="fancy_box"><script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfaddress.js” charset=”utf-8″></script></div></p> <p>This makes sure that your page will load the swfaddress.js and use it accordingly. Make sure that it’s <strong>after</strong> the SWFObject declaration.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">2</span>Adding SWFAddress to your Flash file</h2> <div class="fancy_header"><span>1. Importing the SWFAddress library</span></div> <p>This is where it gets interesting. First we will need to include the SWFAddress library in our FLA. I’ve created a folder on my hard drive that holds several tools and libraries. This keeps me organised and keeps my libraries safe from random <em>format c:</em> moments So let’s say that the path for our external ActionScript code is <strong>E:\Tools\AS</strong>. You will need to go to the <strong>dist\as\2</strong> folder in your SWFAddress folder, and copy the <strong>com</strong> folder over to <strong>E:\Tools\AS</strong>. These are the libraries for ActionScript 2.</p> <p>Next, in your FLA file, go to <strong>Publish Settings > Flash ></strong> And next to ActionScript 2.0 click on <strong>Settings</strong>. Here you will need to add the path to your <strong>E:\Tools\AS</strong> folder.</p> <p>For the SWFAddress functions to work when you compile your FLA, you need to include the library in your ActionScript like this:<br /> <div class="fancy_box">import com.asual.swfaddress.SWFAddress;</div>You need to put this on the first line of <strong>every frame of ActionScript that uses SWFAddress functions</strong>.</p> <p>The next bit is and will be depending on how your site is actually built. There are a few methods that you need to call, depending on what is happening inside your movie.</p> <div class="fancy_header"><span>2. Using the SWFAddress library to enable deep linking<br/>on your flash website</span></div> <p>Fist of all, there is <strong>SWFAddress.setValue()</strong>. This one sets the current URL to the value thrown at it, prefixed by <strong>#/</strong>. For example, if my flash page is at <em>http://yoursite.com</em>, and you run <strong>SWFAddress.setValue(“awesome”)</strong>, the URL will turn into <em>http://yoursite.com/#/awesome</em>. It’s as simple as that! However, that only changes the URL you see, if someone actually typed in that URL in their browser it wouldn’t work. We will get to that in a moment, but first let’s make sure this setValue() thing sinks in </p> <p>So where would you use this? Well let’s say that you have a menu button called About, that takes you to your About page. You will need to add the setValue() function here then:</p> <div class="fancy_box">About.onRelease = function() <div>{</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">SWFAddress.setValue(“about”);</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">//Navigation code</div> <div>}</div> </div> <p>So when someone presses About, they get taken to the About page, and the URL changes accordingly. This was a pretty basic example, but wherever you place setValue(), you will use the same logic. For example, on my website I load my menu dynamically from an XML file. I then add a click function to all the buttons, that would look like this:</p> <div class="fancy_box">_global.clickFunction = function (object) <div>{</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">SWFAddress.setValue(object.name.text.toLowerCase());</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">//Navigation code</div> <div>}</div> </div> <p>Secondly, there is the <strong>SWFAddress.setTitle()</strong> function. This works in the same way as setValue() but instead of changing the URL it changes the title displayed in your browser window. This is pretty straightforward, so we will go on to the last and most important function which is…</p> <p><strong>SWFAddress.onChange() </strong>is where all the magic happens. This function automatically gets triggered whenever the URL changes, either from your application, or from the browser itself. So this is basically where you make your website navigate to a certain page when it “sees” that the URL has changed. In my FLA, I have a lot of stuff happening on frame 1 of the stage (loading XML, resizing window etc.) so that is where I put this function:</p> <div class="fancy_box">SWFAddress.onChange = function() <div>{</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">var addr = SWFAddress.getValue(); //This gets the current URL, but only what was appended to <em>http://yoursite.com/#</em></div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">switch (addr)</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">{</div> <div style="padding-left: 60px;">case “/”:</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">SWFAddress.setTitle(‘My Homepage’);</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">//Code for navigation to <em>homepage</em> goes here</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">break;</div> <div style="padding-left: 60px;">case “/awesome”:</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">SWFAddress.setTitle(‘My Website – Awesome’);</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">//Code for navigation to <em>awesome page</em> code goes here</div> <div style="padding-left: 90px;">break;</div> <div style="padding-left: 60px;">//And so on</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">}</div> <div>}</div> </div> <p>And that’s about it! Remember that this function gets called when the browser changes the URL, i.e. when someone is pressing the back button, but <strong>also</strong> when your application changes the URL. Why is this so important? Because when you place the setValue() code like explained above, you won’t need any more Navigation code whatsoever! When setValue() changes the URL for you, onChange() is called and the navigation is done anyway. So the <strong>onRelease</strong> method would become something like this:</p> <div class="fancy_box">About.onRelease = function() <div>{</div> <div style="padding-left: 30px;">SWFAddress.setValue(“about”);</div> <div>}</div> </div> <div class="fancy_header"><span>3. XML Troubleshooting</span></div> <p>When you have a site that loads all the stuff via an XML file and external SWFs that might load other XML files and other external SWFs, it can get a bit tricky. The main problem that I faced was that SWFAddress.onChange() would get called before the site managed to load the XML, thus the menu and everything else. This happened when someone typed in an URL that was already deep in the hierarchy. So whatever URL they typed in, they still ended up on the homepage.</p> <p>So to fix this, I simply went to the the XML load function, and when the XML gets loaded completely I simply call <strong>SWFAddress.onChange()</strong>. This way, if it was called before the site got loaded and didn’t do anything, after it loads it is called again, checks the URL, and takes the user to the correct page.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">3</span>Conclusion and Flash SEO</h2> <p>Search engines really care about URLs and what they look like. You can read more about this in my previous post, <a title="Drupal SEO for URLs" href="http://www.padizine.com/blog/drupal-seo-for-urls/" target="_blank">Drupal SEO for URLs</a>. More and more Flash sites are picking up on this, and that’s great. Fact is, for the best possible implementation of SWFAddress, you need to think about it before developing your site, and write your code in such a way that it helps SWFAddress instead of hindering it. If you’d like to know more, there’s a host of resources available at <a title="SWFAddress Resources" rel="external nofollow" href="http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/resources/" target="_blank">Asual.com</a>.</p> <p>SEO for Flash has always been a tough battle, but with such a great ally on our side, I can’t stop thinking that we will <em>get there</em> at some point. Have something to <a title="Comment on this" href="#respond">say</a>? Go ahead then!</p> </article> <article> <h1>Drupal 6 Tutorial – SEO For URLs</h1> <p>Alex Petrisor — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:20:17 +0000</p> <p>Hello everyone, allow me to introduce myself, as this is my first tutorial (from many to come hopefully). My name is Alex Petrisor and I’m a Creative Advertising student. However, I also work as a freelance web developer in London.</p> <p>Recently I’ve been working on an on-line store which was created in Drupal 6. As important as SEO might be for any site, for an on-line shop it’s crucial. I was pleased to see how well Drupal handles that, even out-of-the-box.</p> <p>Well, enough of that, let’s jump in!</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">1</span>Clean URLs</h2> <p>Enable <strong>Clean URLs</strong> – This should be already on, but just to make sure go to <em>http://www.yoursite.com/admin/settings/clean-urls</em> and make sure that it’s Enabled.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">2</span>The Path Module – Custom URL aliases</h2> <p>Enable the <strong>Path</strong> module – This is the module that allows you to rename your URLs. Enable it on your modules page at <em>http://www.yoursite.com/admin/build/modules</em> under <strong>Core – optional</strong>. You will now have the option to manually type in the URL for your nodes, on the node editing form at <strong>URL path settings</strong>. This will be a relative path to your domain. So if your domain is <em>http://www.yoursite.com/</em> and you set the URL alias for the node Cookies as <strong>cookies</strong>, the full path of the node will be <em>http://www.yoursite.com/cookies</em>.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">3</span>The Token Module</h2> <p>Download and install the <strong>Token</strong> module <a title="Token Module" rel="external nofollow" href="http://drupal.org/project/token" target="_blank">here</a>. You will probably need this for any Drupal installation, as it provides other modules with certain helpful text variables like the username, post title, taxonomy, etc. In our case it will help with the next module we will use, which is…</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">4</span>The Pathauto Module – Automatic URL aliases</h2> <p>Download and install the <strong>Pathauto</strong> module <a title="Pathauto Module" rel="external nofollow" href="http://drupal.org/project/pathauto" target="_blank">here</a>. This is highly recommended as it creates nice URLs automatically for you, whenever you create new content. It does that based on several things like title, taxonomy, content type, and username. To be honest this will work out-of-the-box, but in case you want a more granular control over the URL structure you can easily change that in the module’s settings. This is where the Token module comes in handy.</p> <p>Let’s say that you wanted all your content of the type page to fall under the following path pattern: <em>http://www.yoursite.com/pages/page-name</em>. For that to happen you would need to go to the <strong>Node Path Settings</strong> under Pathauto, and under <strong>Pattern for all Page paths</strong><em> </em>write <strong>pages/[title-raw]</strong> and hit <strong>Save configuration</strong>. The [title-raw] will automatically get replaced with an alias that reflects your current page’s title, thanks to Token. If you click on <strong>Replacement Patterns</strong> you will get a list of all the variables that you can use in your URLs.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">5</span>The Global Redirect Module</h2> <p>Download and install the Global Redirect module <a title="Global Redirect Module" rel="external nofollow" href="http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect" target="_blank">here</a>. This module addresses one important SEO issue: canonicalization of your URLs. What that means is that it makes sure that for each piece of content you have, there is one URL and <strong>one URL only</strong>. These are some of the things it does:</p> <ul> <li>Removes trailing slashes from URLs (“/”)</li> <li>Permanently redirects any requests for content using the non-clean URL format</li> <li>Permanently redirects any requests that refer to the homepage, but use something other than the canonical URL for the homepage address.</li> <li>Permanently redirects any requests for content where the case of the requested URL does not match the case of the canonical URL.</li> </ul> <p>This, as expected, won’t need much (if any) configuration either.</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">6</span>Drupal Rewrite Rules – htaccess friendly url</h2> <p>Last, but not least, as the final step for URL SEO, you need to decide whether to use <em>http://www.yoursite.com</em> or <em>http://yoursite.com</em>. By default both work and point to the same place. That can confuse the spider so it’s best if you just use one of them. I tend to use the <em>www</em> version, but it’s entirely up to you.</p> <p>So here’s how we do this: In your drupal 6 installation folder, you will find a file called <strong>.htaccess</strong>. You need to edit that file, so scroll down to<br /> <div class="fancy_box"># If your site can be accessed both with and without the ‘www.’ prefix, you<br /> # can use one of the following settings to redirect users to your preferred<br /> # URL, either WITH or WITHOUT the ‘www.’ prefix. Choose ONLY one option:</div>and follow the instructions (you just need to remove a couple of # and write down your domain name).</p> <h2><span class="dropcap1">7</span>Rejoice!</h2> <p>That’s right, you deserve it! And remember, keep your pages rich with meaningful content. There is not much point for optimization if there is nothing to optimize right?</p> <p>Well, that’s about it for drupal SEO for now. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, and if you have, you’ll be happy to hear that I will write a new one soon covering page titles, keywords, descriptions, sitemaps and some more juicy stuff.</p> <p>Do you have anything to <a title="Comment on this" href="#respond">add</a> to optimizing Drupal 6 URLs?</p> </article> </main></body></html>