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Passion of Christ according to Benny Hill

For those deeply religious and devout christians among you, you are about to be deeply offended, for all others, have a good chuckle!

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Richard’s Dummies guide to Drupal SEO

(For Drupal development see Jacana – a Boulder Drupal Development Company)

After upgrading a few of my Drupal 4.7 sites to the shiny new 5.0 distribution I felt the need to document my quest for search engine bliss. As content management systems go, Drupal is quite good out of the box (comes with sexy looking URLs built in) but some elbow grease is still required to enter search engine nirvana. It would be nice to have all of the modules and tweaks I have document below built right into Drupal core. After all, the best looking, fastest loading and most expensive website is useless if it can’t be found in google.

Background to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about how search engines work and why some pages get ranked better than others, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader 🙂 I’ve added external links to some SEO terms and basic HTML definitions that I talk about in this article so if you’re a total newbie then you may need to get a clicking. The most important search engine as of March 2007 is Google so my notes are based upon my experience with Google. I realize however that some search engines may not use some of the items I list below to rank or index web pages but adding the modules won’t hurt your rankings either.

What Google and other search engines want

Google ideally would like you to have the following items: (if you don’t have em’ your page will still get indexed but you may not get the results you want): 1) A TITLE tag: An example may look like this: Richard’s Drupal Website and is normally a maximum of 60 characters in length. Why is the title tag so important? Google uses this on its search results page and is the blue, bold, underlined heading. The title tag is one of the most important element in SEO so if you want to even get in the game, get a nice descriptive TITLE tag for each page on your Drupal website. By default Drupal creates the title tag of the page from the contents of the Title field but being able to specify an exact title for the title tag will give you more control over your placement in the search engines. We’ll be using the Page Title Module to satisfy this requirement. The image below shows where the title tag text is used on the google search results page:
2) The Description Meta tag: In html speak an html meta description tag may look like the following: Why use the Description Meta tag? Google also uses this data in it’s search results page as a description of your website under the blue heading. A good Meta Description is no longer than 150 characters and should be a short concise description of the content of the webpage. We’ll be using the Nodewords module to generate description meta tags. A huge problem I see all the time is if no Meta Description Tag is present on a web page, Google trys to guess what text to use and grabs irrelevant text from the page. This often results in a Meta Tag Description having nothing to do with the site at all, merely confusing the web surfer. See an example of how google uses the description meta tag in it’s search results below:

3) A nice easy to read URL. An example of a not so nice URL would be www.mylittleportal.com/?q=lasodfnsodfon/dsafasdf6487632846832 – yikes! A nice, easy to read URL would look like www.mylittleportal.com/Drupal-SEO-tips To satisfy this requirement we’ll be using Drupal’s “Enable Clean URLs” option. Google also likes sites that are laid out cleanly. A URL on a site that’s laid out cleanly my look like this: www.MyLittlePortal.com/Outdoors/ – this is URL that points to a section on my website that list all Outdoor related articles. A poorly laid out site may use the following URL to jump to the same section: www.MyLittlePortal.com/taxonomy/term/6+5 – what URL would you rather be looking at?! We’ll use the PathAuto Module to neaten up URLs on our site. An additional tweak albeit more complex is to make your URL point to just www.yourURL.com not yourURL.com, google supposedly prefers this – for this well edit the cryptic .htaccess file. (Note: web page names don’t have to end in .html anymore, browser know what type of file they receive by code at the top of every webpage) 4) A way for a search engine to easily find all the pages on your website – we’ll use an XML file to satisfy this conditon. This will allow the search engine spiders (spiders are programs search engines use to slurp up all of your web pages into their database) to easily find all of your content. For this we’ll use the XML Sitemap module that creates a fancy XML file in accordance with the Sitemaps.org specification. We then tell Google and other search engines about the file 5) A robots.txt file in your root directory. My robots.txt file is more of a list of what I DON”T want google to index rather than what I do. So now we know what Google and other search engines like let give them what they want!

Steps to make Drupal more search engine friendly

First, make sure the following items are enabled in your current Drupal install.

  • Enable Clean URLs – This option makes Drupal emit “clean” URLs (i.e. without ?q= in the URL.) You can enable this module by going to yourWebsiteAddress.com/admin/settings/clean-urls.
  • Enable Path module – Allows users to rename URLs. – this is very important of satisfying step 4 in the “What google wants” section above. As usual is hidden in the bowls of Drupal admin – hint take a look here: admin/build/modules

Now Install these additional modules

  • Page Title Module – give all your pages title tags Get it here Once installed it can be administered here: admin/settings/page_title
  • Nodewords (Meta Tags) Module- description and keyword tags Download the module here The module may also be known under following names: nodewords or node (key)words. Meta tags is the preferred name. Once installed it can be administered here: admin/content/nodewords
  • PathAuto Module – Used to Neaten up URLs The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system which the administrator can control. Get it here Once installed it can be administered here: admin/settings/pathauto.
  • XML Sitemap (formerly Google Sitemap) XML Sitemap automatically creates a site map that conforms to the sitemaps.org specification. This helps search engines keep their search results up to date. Download the modulehere Once installed it can be administered here: admin/settings/gsitemap. To use the XLM sitmap module with google you’ll need a google account (email address). Go to this page.
  • Change your .htaccess file so that www.mysite.com and mysite.com go to the same place. See details on how to do this further on in this article.

So you’ve installed the recommended modules above, now what?

I’ll use the example of adding a new story to my website to show you how we can use the new modules and goodies we’ve just added. A new story is created by going to node/add/story. The first thing you’ll notice when looking at the add story page is a new field below the Title field called Page Title. Add the text for your title tag here. (The name is a little confusing, it should be labeled Title Tag!)

Scroll down and below “Input Format” you see a place to put text for the Meta Description tag. Enter a description for you page, try not to excede 150 characters.

Scroll down further and you’ll see the URL path setting field. Enter a descriptive name for your new page eg. my-new-page-about-fish may be appropriate if you like cod. Be sure to include keyword in the page name, Google likes this!!

Also note that the PathAuto has made my URLs nice and neat, here is an example of one that list all car reviw articles under the Auto category: www.mylittleportal.com/auto/car-reviews/ To use the XLM sitmap module with google you’ll need a google account (email address). Go to this page at Google’s webmaster tool section. I also suggest reading the INSTALL.TXT file that’ll tell you how to use this module and get it talking to Google. Requires a bit more elbow grease that installing the other modules but you don’t have to code it yourself right. See an example of my robots.txt here.. Drupal allows pages to be served using a number of ways. You can specify the page my-little-page.html or the same page could be mylittleportal.com/node/22. It’s better for the search engines to have just one name / reference for each page so we’ll disallow them from going to anywhere they see /node/. Now to make google happy we can also get all references of myLittleportal.com to point / redirect to www.mylittleportal.com. This will help as gets rid of duplicate content. Add this code to your .htaccess file. (there is code that is similar in the .htaccess file but it will direct everything that does not have a www prefix to your front page.) So just add the following two lines change the URL to that of your own website: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mylittleportal\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.mylittleportal.com/$1 [R=301,L]


Here is another article on Drupal SEO at Devbee.com – let’s hope this link rockets you back into the coveted number 3 spot on Google mate! Be sure to read the comments people left regarding this article, there is a nice explanation of what pathauto really does (thanks TheWhippinpost). Here is another page with some more general SEO Tips. Here is a series of SEO articles from an Organic search optimization expertat IBM – a nice newbie read. I’ve opened up comments on this article. Feel free to shamlessly promote your Drupal SEO articles too.

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Wayne Dyer’s Steps to abundance in all forms

More Wayne D. Stuff.

Intentional Success

Wayne Dyer is not afraid to say out loud that making money and feeling secure in your finances do not conflict with surrendering to intention. Here are his steps to abundance in all forms.

Step 1: See the world as an abundant, providing, friendly place. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. When you see the world as abundant and friendly, your intentions are genuine possibilities. They will, in fact, become a certainty, because your world will be experienced from the higher frequencies. In this first step, you’re receptive to a world that provides rather than restricts. You’ll see a world that wants you to be successful and abundant rather than one that conspires against you.

Step 2: Affirm: I attract success and abundance into my life because that is who I am. This puts you into vibratory harmony with your Source. Your goal is to eliminate any distance between what you desire and that from which you pull to bring it into your life. Abundance and success aren’t out there waiting to show up for you. You are already it, and the Source can only provide you with what it is — and, consequently, what you are — already.

Step 3: Stay in an attitude of allowing. Resistance is disharmony between your desire for abundance and your beliefs about your ability or worthiness. Allowing means a perfect alignment. An attitude of allowing means that you ignore efforts by others to dissuade you. It also means that you don’t rely on your pervious ego-oriented beliefs about abundance being a part of or not a part of your life. In an attitude of allowing, all resistance in the form of thoughts of negativity or doubt is replaced with simply knowing that you and your Source are one and the same. Picture the abundance you desire freely flowing directly to you. Refuse to do anything or have any thought that compromises your alignment with Source.

Step 4: Use your present moments to activate thoughts that are in harmony with the seven faces of intention (creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance and peaceful receptivity). The key phrase here is present moments. Notice right now, in this moment, if you’re thinking that it’s hopeless at this stage of your life to change the thoughts that comprise your belief system. Do you defeat yourself with thoughts of having had such a long life practicing affirmations of scarcity and creating resistance to your success and abundance that you don’t have enough time left to counterbalance the thoughts that comprise your belief system?

Make the choice to let go of that lifetime of beliefs, and begin activating thoughts right now that allow you to feel good. Say I want to feel good whenever anyone tries to convince you that your desires are futile. Say I want to feel good when you’re tempted to return to low-energy thoughts of disharmony with intention. Eventually your present moments will activate thoughts that make you feel good, and this is an indicator that you’re reconnecting to intention. Wanting to feel good is synonymous with wanting to feel God. Remember: “God is good, and all that God created was good.”

Step 5: Initiate actions that support your feelings of abundance and success. Here, the key word is actions. I’ve been calling this acting as if or thinking from the end and acting that way. Put your body into a gear that pushes you toward abundance and feeling successful. Act on those passionate emotions as if the abundance and success you seek are already here. Speak to strangers with passion in your voice. Answer the telephone in an inspired way. Do a job interview from the place of confidence and joy. Read the books that mysteriously show up, and pay close attention to conversations that seem to indicate you’re being called to something new.

Step 6: Remember that your prosperity and success will benefit others, and that no one lacks abundance because you’ve opted for it. The supply is unlimited. The more you partake of the generosity of the universe, the more you’ll have to share with others. In writing this book, wonderful abundance has flowed into my life in many ways. But even more significantly, book editors and graphic designers, the truck drivers who deliver the book, the auto workers who build the trucks, the farmers who feed the auto workers, and bookstore clerks, all receive abundance because I’ve followed my bliss and have written this book.

Step 7: Monitor your emotions as a guidance system for your connection to the universal mind of intention. Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or inspired, if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life. When you’re experiencing low-energy emotions of rage, anger, hatred, anxiety, despair, and the like, that’s a clue that while your desires may be strong, they’re completely out of sync with the field of intention. Remind yourself in these moments that you want to feel good, and see if you can activate a thought that supports your feeling good.

Step 8: Become as generous to the world with your abundance as the field of intention is to you. Don’t stop the flow of abundant energy by hoarding or owning what you receive. Keep it moving. Use your prosperity in the service of others, and for causes greater than your ego. The more you practice detachment, the more you’ll stay in vibratory harmony with the all-giving Source of everything.

Step 9: Devote the necessary time to meditate on the Spirit within as the source of your success and abundance. There’s no substitute for the practice of meditation. This is particularly relevant with abundance. You must have an understanding that your consciousness of the Presence is your supply. By repeating the sound that is in the name of God as a mantra, you’re using a technique for manifesting as ancient as recorded history. I am particularly drawn to the form of meditation called Japa. I know it works.

Step 10: Develop an attitude of gratitude for all that manifests into your life. Be thankful and filled with awe and appreciation, even if what you desire hasn’t arrived yet. Even the darkest days of your life are to be looked on with gratitude. Everything coming from Source is on purpose. Be thankful while empowering your reconnection to that form from which you and everything else originated.

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WiFI, Coffee and a view – The New Moon Bakery in Nederland, Colorado

With the demise of the popular coffee shop known as Acoustic Coffee and the lack of internet at the little coffee shop that’s located in a rail road car, Nederland appeared to be up the proverbial smelly creek when it came to sipping the brown stuff and surfing the Internet. Well I’m glad to report all is not lost. The space that used to house Katmandu several years ago is now home to a coffee shop and bakery (The New Moon Bakery) that boasts among other things a speedy WIFI internet connection.

Being the geek that I am I was curious to partake of the coffee and the wonderful fresh feeling of WiFi at 9000ft. After ordering a bog standard “Soy Cafe O’lay” I firined up my icy cold Powerbook. I’d been cross country skiing by the Moffet Tunnel and lappy had waited patiently for me for a couple of hours in the trunk of my car. It was literally icy cold to the touch and I’d ready somewhere that you should let a laptop that has been left in a cold car warm up to room temperature for half an hour or so. Summin to do with the squishy LCD material. Well I digress so on with my tale. I started by running a speed test that resulted in a slowish 256k download and 700k upload speed, something on paper that sounds piss poor but in reality after browsing some of my favorite sites I concluded that it was in fact pretty zippy and probably connected to a T1 line somewhere.

The coffee wasn’t too shabby either and if you sit in the front of the coffee shop there is a nice big row of windows where you can watch the world go by, gaze off into the distance at the green hillside of pines as well as get a nice view of the public shite house that is a mere 30 feet from the front door. So next time you’re in Nederland give New Moon Bakery a try.

The cafe can be found in Nederland (16.8 miles from Boulder up Boulder Canyon):

1 W 1st St
Nederland, CO 80466

Hours: Open Sun 8am-3:30pm, Mon-Tues 6am-3:30pm, Wed-Fri 6am-5pm, and Sat 7am-5pm. Tel. (303) 258-3569

Here is a Google Maps link

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Cell Phone do not call list. Urban Ledgends and other guff.

A mate of mine recently forwarded an email claiming that a directory of cell phone numbers will soon be published and presumably made available to anyone, including telemarketers. All recipients were encouraged to call 888-382-1222 and have their number added to the do no call list.

My first course of action when receiving an email of this nature normally involves a quick scan of the Urban Legends website know as Snopes.com. Sure enough the claims in this email came up as FALSE (see this page for full details) but as with all urban legends there is a grain of truth in the email (from Snopes): A national directory will be compiled, but numbers will be included on an opt-in basis. If a cell phone subscriber does nothing, the number will not be listed. When the directory is ready, it will be available only as part of the existing 411 directory service, accessed by calling in and asking for a specific number. It will not be published in a book or on the Internet. And it will not be sold to telemarketers.

The moral of the story is check with Snopes.com first before you forward any emails that contain wild claims to 100 of your mates. Sure, I always find it fun to ream this particular gent a new one when he messes up but if you add up the time wasted for all the recipients to figure out that the email is in fact false you might be quite alarmed. Let assume this fellow forwarded it to 8 of his pals (I see he did looking at the To: field of the email) If each of those people forwarded it to 8 of their friends and those to 8 of theirs then you can see we’re headed up that smelly creek for sure!

So let’s all make New Year’s Resolution Number 7: “I will check with Snopes.com first before forwarding any alarmist emails to my pals”

I think I’d like to create my own Urban Legend this year so if you have any ideas drop me a line. I also have a pretty good idea of whom the first recipient of this email will be in order for it to propagate around the Internet like a nasty dose of the Clapp!


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Corporate Sexual Harassment Training Video

On a serous note: We had a meeting at work today and the difficult topic of sexual harassment came up. I really had a new understanding of the subject after watching a short video on the subject (the creators were kind enough to have posted an online version) I think as men we should all be aware of this kind of behavior and and try our best to be gentlemen at all times. I encourage you to forward this to as many guys as possible and let’s help stamp out this kind of antisocial behavior for good!

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Jesus Jacket – with Benny Hinn

Benny Hinn meets Benny Hill! See him swat the congregation with his “Jesus Jacket”!

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Liz’s Oxford Foray


Oxford was first occupied in Saxon times, and was initially known as “Oxenaforda”. It began with the foundations of St Frideswide’s nunnery in the 8th century, and was first mentioned in written records in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 912. In the 10th century Oxford became an important military frontier town between the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex and was on several occasions raided by Danes. St Frideswide is the patron saint of both the city and university.

The University of Oxford is first mentioned in 12th century records. Oxford’s earliest colleges were University College (1249), Balliol (1263) and Merton (1264). These colleges were established at a time when Europeans were starting to translate the writings of Greek philosophers. These writings challenged European ideology – inspiring scientific discoveries and advancements in the arts – as society began seeing itself in a new way. These colleges at Oxford were supported by the Church in hopes to reconcile Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology.

Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford is unique as a college chapel and cathedral in one foundation. Originally the Priory Church of St Frideswide, the building was extended and incorporated into the structure of the Cardinal’s College shortly before its refounding as Christ Church in 1546, since which time it has functioned as the cathedral of the Diocese of Oxford.

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The Farting Preacher

Holy smokes! I found this video on google video – Warning, DO NOT drink and watch this video at the same time, I was laughing so much I almost choked on my coffee. For those curious among you, it seems that the Farting Preacher one Robert Tilton was a right rotten bastard, instructing his employees to throw prayer request in the trash after removing any cash, checks and jewelery from the returned mailers!

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Fix a frozen iPod


This has happened to me at least on one occasion and it’s a common problem, after all an ipod is a mini computer and computer do lock up from time to time!

Symptoms

The bloody things doesn’t respond to your nubs or you plugging it into a computer.

Solution

If you’re lucky a simple hard reset is all that is needed. How:

1) Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.) It’s the little switch on top on your ipod.

2) Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

See the full help article on apple.com website here.

NOTE:Your ipod may have to be plugged into it’s power adaptor or a computer to get the above steps to work.


Now what if your ipod reboots, shows the apple logo and comes up with a funny little icon! Well, check out this article – iPod iconology that will tell you what the little picture on means? and to see what action to take. (hint: sad iPod icon is bad bad bad!) Shite, now this is getting complicated.


I fixed my house mate’s iPod by doing a hard reset (Solution 1) and then because I got a nice little Icon on the screen ( Folder with exclamation point) after the reboot I had to put it in Disk mode. (The iPod in questions was well and truly buggered!) See this article – Putting iPod into Disk Mode on how to put your ipod into Disk mode. You basically do a hard reset then immediately afterwards press the Select and Play keys. Once she was in Disk mode I was able to run the ipod updater and restore the software to the ipod. See this page to get the iPod updater software.

In Summary!

  • Ipod locked up: do a hard reset (toggle hold switch then press select and menu keys) Ipod should reboot and all is well.
  • Ipod displays funny Icons after reboot: you’ll need to probably put it into Disk mode (hard reboot then press select and play keys)
  • Ipod should now be good to go or you sill may have to do a restore using the iPod updater software (bet you’re glad you backed up all your tunes!!!)
  • These steps should be good for both PC and Mac iPods – older generation iPods (iPod, iPod (scroll wheel), iPod (touch wheel), and iPod (dock connector) ) will require different key sequences for hard reset ( after toggling the hold button press Play/Pause and Menu buttons not Menu and Select buttons)