Good Reads

DrupalCamp Brings Florida IT Community Together

A dedicated community of Open Source content management software developers from throughout the Sunshine State are convening February 20th and 21st at the annual Florida DrupalCamp in Altamonte Springs.

This year, new and seasoned users of Drupal (Drupal.org) will spend Saturday participating in beginner, intermediate and advanced education tracks, and Sunday working together in a "Coding for a Cause" sprint to create a Drupal web site for a selected non-profit organization.

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If you haven't already heard, Drupal 7 will default to using the InnoDB storage engine instead of MyISAM for MySQL (though a MyISAM database will continue to work just fine in Drupal 7). This is fairly substantial change within Drupal core, and as the thread in the issue queue I linked to shows, there were a lot of questions and apprehension about it. However...

...we are going to just skip over a lot of that apprehension and get down to point of this article - there's no good reason not to hop right into using InnoDB today on your Drupal 5 or Drupal 6 site. The rewards are; a possibly significant improvement in performance, a definite improvement in scalability (most highly trafficked Drupal sites have been using InnoDB for some time now because of this), and you'll start getting used to working with what will be more and more common in your Drupal-life, InnoDB.

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I am often presented with visions of poor and haggard open source enthusiasts walking the streets in disarray and varying degrees of sanity.  These programmers, artists and content managers could be working for upstanding corporations earning an honest dollar, instead they sit around working on projects with no monetary value.  It's bad enough that we have hordes of these people already but sadly they are training a new generation of open source zealots to tread in their meaningless empty footsteps.

It is commonly agreed upon that the only software worth producing is "enterprise" that is controlled by a single corporation.  The unguided masses swear that a large distributed developer base is an alternative and possibly better solution to proprietary software.  Why have thousands of people from various backgrounds work towards one goal when you can't fire them?  How can you trust the aim of an unguided group that isn't driven by fear or money?

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We recently started on a project and began work implementing the features when we were told that it needed to be based on Pressflow. After a small moment of panic at the thought of having to redo all of the work done thus far, Dave assured me that it was a simple drop-in to replace regular 'vanilla' Drupal core with Pressflow. Still, leaving nothing to chance, I wanted to see just what these differences were and how it would effect my current code base. Was it really that simple?

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If you want to contribute actual changes to the Drupal software, you have to do it through patches. Patches are a kind of text file that describe the changes in a way that lets them easily be applied to the official code base. To create them, you have to jump through a couple of hoops, especially checking out Drupal head from CVS and creating the actual patch from the changes you made.

Contrary to popular belief among the developer community, creating patches is not easy for some. Using the text-only interface of the command line is a big hurdle for the more visually oriented. I finally found a way to do this CVS-checkout-and-patching thing without using the command line but through a free app with a graphical user interface.

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Every development house and their dogs seem to have a 'TOP 10 DRUPAL MODULES - Absolute definitive version!!' blog post somewhere at the minute, and they all tend to be fairly similar - 'Views, CCK, Image' etc...

We have decided to go a different route, and do our own summary of drupal modules (and combinations) that we use all the time, which you may not have used before.

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Posted by chenry

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I was recently inspired by a post by MikeTek, Examining the Top 150 In-Linked Posts at SEOmoz.  While the information was very informative, it was taken from a limited sample of the over 3,800 post on SEOmoz.  Along with the small sample size, the data was not proportional to other categories and posts.  Mike encouraged anyone with a little automation skills to look into all the data on SEOmoz and really look into what makes a post link worthy. 

For this post we will be looking only at In Linking Domains (ILDs) which is a great way to determine if a post is popular throughout the net.  For example if you have a site like dummy-domain.com that links to your post 1,000 times throughout its site, it would count as 1 ILD.  A great viral post will have a large number of ILDs along with a large number of links.

LET'S START WITH THE DATA

Much like Mike’s data, there were some categories that collected more links than others.  In fact there were five categories that have the most domains linking to them, Link Building (1,448 domains), Google (1,419 domains), Technical Issues (1,243 domains), Miscellaneous (1,215 domains), and Whiteboard Friday (1,044 domains).  See the graph below for the top 30 of the SEOmoz categories.

The data in the chart above can be a little misleading because some of those categories have many more posts than others do.  To make all the data proportional, I took the total number of linking domains and divided it by the number of posts.  The chart changes considerably when the data becomes normalized.  From the chart below you can see that the top 3 categories are Webdev (19), Technical Issues (14), and On-Page Issues (10).

From the charts above it’s easy to say that “Link Building” is a very popular blog topic but it doesn’t always draw in the links like other topic can.  Part of that could be because of the difference in options on link building techniques.  Topics like “Technical Issues” and “On-Page Issues” the types of content that most people will agree on and possibly want to share with others in the business.

To take the study a little further, I stored all the post’s title’s and created a title word cloud for the top 10% of the 3,800.  This hopefully will give you an idea of what topics could have the possibility of being link worthy in your future post.  I was going to try and come up with a “Super” title based on the words in the cloud but couldn’t come up with anything catchy.  Maybe one of you Mozzers can come up with something amazing from the cloud.

Like Mike did in his previous post, let’s take a look at the content in the posts: images, list, and videos.  In the chart below you will see that having a just a list in a post compared to just text, doubles the average number of linking domains.  Have a video compared to just text will almost triple the average number of linking domains.  A post that has an image and a list will also triple the average number of linking domains to the post.

I’m sure many of you are like me and do a quick scan of the post before actually reading it.  By adding images, videos, and lists, it makes it easy to get a quick synopsis on what the post is about, encouraging people to go back and do a full read along with a possible link.  Adding Images and Lists are easy to do and could result in a post that is more link worthy.

I also recorded the length of the post to see if it had an effect on the average number of linking domains.  The length recorded was only that of the post and not the comments or other areas of the page to keep the data accurate.  I’ve read that most blog post should be kept to 500 words or less.  That information seems to be incorrect if you are going to post on SEOmoz and want it to be link worthy.  The chart below shows that posts with 1800 or more words have a much higher average of linking domains.

BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

I feel the real take away from this post is in the last two graphics summarized below:

• Content is most important thing to a posts but posts with extra visual content attract extra links.
• By adding simple visual content, like lists and images, can increase the number of ILDs by good percent.
• Posts with videos included will attract almost 3 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Posts with all three media types (videos, images, and lists) will attract almost 6 times more ILDs than a plain text post.
• Contrary to common beliefs, large posts seem to attract more links than posts with 900 words or less.
• Posts with between 1800 and 3000 words will attract more than 15 times more ILDs than a post with less than 600 words.

The first part of this study was only with SEOmoz data and in the next part of this study I have decided to take on a huge project and taking a look at some of the top SEO/Internet Marketing blogs on the web.  With a larger sample size we may be able to find out if the information found during this study will hold true in other areas.  Stay tuned!

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Startup Building 101 –

Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley.

Some readers requested to see the presentation deck as well, so here it is. Patzer shows how he raised and spent money, and generated revenue, throughout the lifecycle of Mint, from the very beginning to the $170 million acquisition. He also showed historical slides from early presentations to investors and compares those to the actual results.

I’m also re-embedding the full video below.

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