Internet Marketing Strategies and Drupal Tips

Oct 29 2010

About the PNW Drupal Summit in Vancouver, Canada

First written Oct. 4, 2010: I think the highlight of the Summit for me was the DrupalChix BOF (Birds of Feather) held on Sunday afternon. About 12 women who work with Drupal met together for small group informal discussion. It was interesting to listen to each person’s intro as they told how they got started with Drupal.
Oct 1 2010

How to Create Facebook Page for your Business - Sept 2010

Sorry this is being released a little bit late. Better late than never, right? Enjoy your FREE issue of monthly Internet Marketing Tips. Here is our September 2010 newsletter:

With over 500 million users on Facebook, it makes sense to have a Page on Facebook.com for your business. They are also important because they show up high in the search engine results. And you can also get an unlimited number of “fans” for your Facebook Page, unlike your regular Facebook profile which has a maximum of 5,000 friends.

Here's how to create a Facebook page for your company:
1. First you need to sign up for a personal account.
2. Now you can add a Facebook Page to promote your Business on Facebook.com

Sep 23 2010

PNW Drupal Summit - Oct. 2-3, 2010 - Vancouver, BC Canada

I am going to Drupal Summit 2010 this October 2-3rdI"m getting excited! The PNW Drupal Summit is only 10 days away! 240 Drupal users from all over the Pacific Northwest will be gathering in Vancouver on October 2 and 3rd. This year we have two keynote speakers: Angie Byron, will be speaking on "The Drupal Community: Where are we going and how can you get involved?" And Josh Koenig will be speaking on "Enterprise Drupal: Managing epic scope, scale and speed without losing your hair".

This year's Summit features two full days of workshops with 4 tracks: Development & Code, Design & Theming, Site Building and Administration, Business & Project Management. We also have small groups (called BoF- Birds of Feather) gathering for informal discussions on a variety of topics.
Aug 31 2010

How to Use Twitter to Expand Your Business - Part 2

1. Use Hootsuite.com to schedule your tweets throughout the day. Some people (like me) send tweets when they have the time and end up sending a bunch at one time. But I’ve learned it’s much better to schedule your tweets using a tool like Hootsuite and send 5 or 6 tweets throughout the day. You’ll have more Klout.

2. Klout is a measure of your influence in the Twittersphere. I noticed that Twitter users with more followers than followees had higher Klout scores. Some people will follow a whole bunch of people just to get them to follow them back. This is not the best strategy. The best thing to do is to follow people you are interested in following and who are important in your industry.

Read More
 

Aug 28 2010

DrupalCon Chicago, March 8-10, 2011

DrupalCon Chicago March 8-10, 2011DrupalCon Chicago is being held March 8-10, 2011. The DrupalCon Chicago team is renting Sheraton Hotel and Tower. It has 1200 guest rooms, 4 restaurants and 2 bars. And hopefully strong and robust Wi-Fi and lots of great coffee! All DrupalCon sessions will be held in the hotel and you can book rooms there for only $179.00 USD per night. Sounds awesome! After the sessions, you can go upstairs to your room and take a nap!
 
The keynote speakers will be Dries Buytaert, Drupal Founder, and Jared Spool, Usability Guru, and Clay Shirley, Internet Visionary. Drupal Training Day will be held the day before the DrupalCon begins in the University of Chicago building across the street from the Sheraton Hotel.

You can help promote DrupalCon Chicago by signing up to be a DrupalCon Chicago Ambassador. Go to the contact page and chooose category - Request for DrupalCamp or local user group sticker packet.  The kit comes with several DrupalCon stickers. You place them in unique places, take a photo and geo tag the photo and upload to Flikr, I think. Sounds like fun, sign me up. Me want DrupalCon stickers! Yeah! Only 191 days until DrupalCon Chicago! More Drupal Fun!

Questions for you - Please leave comments below. Thank you.
Would you like to attend DrupalCon Chicago in 2011?
Aug 28 2010

DrupalCon Copenhagen Closing Session Aug. 26, 2010

DrupalCon Copenhagen was held Aug 23-27, 2010. I watched the closing session recorded by DrupalRadar.com. They also had a live TV broadcast each day at 5pm Copenhagen time.  Steve Parks did a great job as TV host. He went into the audience and asked what sessions they liked the best. Jen Lampton's session was mentioned, Wordpress is better than Drupal: Developers take note. Yes, quite controversial, said Steve Parks. He also asked what would you like to say to the organizers. Need more coffee. Apparently they ran out of coffee. Microsoft was a sponsor. They paid for 900 bottles of beer for the participants.  DrupalRadar.com is a new online trade magazine for all things Drupal that launched this past week. They also have live TV broadcasts made possible by Brightcove.
 
Vancouver’s own Angie Byron gave a report on the bug fixing status of Drupal 7. On Aug. 23rd there were 24 critical bugs and after a day of bug fixing the count was down to 18 bugs and they were elated! But then more bugs were discovered and critical bug count went back up to 24. But they planned a code sprint for Aug. 27th so they hoped to get more bugs squashed and also to get the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to 7 fixed up real soon.
 
A big thank you to Morten and Isabelle and the Organizing team! Great job on a great DrupalCon!

Looks like the next DrupalCon Europe will be held in London, UK in 2011. I hope the dates will be in September so we can get discounted rates for flights from Canada. I noticed only 15 Canadians attended DrupalCon Copenhagen. Vancouverites Djun Kim, Ariane K. and Angie Byron, and Karoly (chx) attended.

Questions for you:
What do you like about DrupalCon Copenhagen? Would you like to attend DrupalCon London in 2011?
Please leave your comments below - we'd love to hear from you!
Aug 25 2010

Summer Updates

In July, we launched Fightwriter.com. We upgraded this site from Drupal 4 to a much more reliable and stable website in Drupal 6.  We also added subscriptions services where boxing fans can sign up and pay for expert sports boxing tips. More information, see Fightwriter.com Project.

Also in July, pnwdrupalsummit.org redesign project was launched. Katy coordinated the website design committee and Alex Ventpap did a great job on the graphics design. Katy also built the Drupal 6 theme for the site. The conference is being held in Vancouver, Canada, on October 2-3, 2010. For more project details, see PNWdrupalsummit.org Project.
Jun 25 2010

Fort Langley - Online Business Directory


We launched a new website this week, www.fortlangley.com. It features a searchable online business directory with over 100 businesses. The home page features a beautiful photo slideshow and lots of good information on Day Trips, Festivals and more.  Custom photography for the slideshow and photo gallery by Katy of Seascapewebdesign.com.

More info on Fortlangley.com Project

Jun 23 2010

Free Online Tools for Your Small Business

1. Primo PDF – This is a free tool that enables you to convert your Word documents and Photoshop designs to PDF format. It comes with a plugin that works like a printer. You choose it from your printer menu. Works great! I use it all the time to send design mockups and documents to my clients. www.primopdf.com

Read More

Jun 23 2010

Keep your website healthy and secure by upgrading to Drupal 6

A new project I'm currently working on is upgrading www.Fightwriter.com. It has 2500 articles about boxing. The original site was created in Drupal 4.5 and will be upgraded to Drupal 6.

The site owner first contacted me to ask me to fix his website. Since his web host company no longer supports PHP 4, his site broke down and he was not able to upload images to the website. Here's the advice I gave him.

Unfortunately, your current website cannot be fixed. You will need to upgrade to Drupal 6 to have a stable working website. You have plans to expand and improve your site, now is a good time to do that. We can update your design, add new features and give you a stable working website. Now is the best time to expand your website and add the new members section.

We recommend that you upgrade your website to Drupal 6. This means that we will build a new website for you in Drupal 6. The new website will be very secure and stable. Your old website software is no longer supported and will most likely keep breaking down.

This is good advice for anyone running a Drupal 4 website. Most web hosts have upgraded to PHP version 5 and no longer support PHP 4 which is used on most Drupal 4.x websites.

Drupal 7 is expected to be released late this summer. After that happens, Drupal 5 will no longer be supported. This means that no Drupal 5 modules will be updated or no more security updates will be available for Drupal 5.

Please contact us
to help you transition to a stable secure version of Drupal.