The latest episode of the Seven Generations Technosanity Podcast is a video as will be the next few episodes. I've been resisting doing video work partly because it's harder to edit but also the technology is far more complex. But for the episodes in question I need to show some things, not describe them. For technical context, the podcast is on a Drupal site meaning the solution has to fit the Drupal workflow.

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Apple iLife '08

The search engines downgrade sites which appear to have duplicated content. This is often the sign of a spam site that's attempting to bury search engines with lots of pages. Unfortunately some features of Drupal make it look like duplicate content. For example if you've turned on clean URL's and turned on the pathauto module for SEO purposes you have a nice user-friendly URL for each page but at the same time Drupal still shows the page at the "node/12345" URL.

Search engines index the web by crawling along links on web pages. It's rather inefficient for a search engine to reindex pages which have not changed and which have already been indexed. Hence it improves efficiency of the whole internet for search engines to have a way to know what pages are new, what pages are old, and only reindex the new pages.

I've never used META tags on any of my sites but many people swear by them. A META tag appears in the HEAD section of an HTML page and is supposed to give keywords related to the content of the page. See Meta Tags for general documentation on them.

Drupal and Clean URL's described how to enable "Clean URL's" in Drupal. It's useful to know why you should enable Clean URL's.

Out of the box Drupal default URL format is: example.com/?q=node/12345.

While not terribly egregious this URL format is not helpful for search engine optimization. One rule of thumb in SEO is for the URL to contain words relevant to the article. The default URL of node/12345 is not relevant to the article.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical component in the quest to find readers, as it appears most people find websites via search engines. The king of search engine sourced hints (otherwise known as 'organic traffic') is Google, of course. How do we enable SEO effects in Drupal?

On 7gen.com I am running a podcast about sane uses of technology and am using the RSS Remote Enclosure module to handle creating the podcast feed. A podcast is merely an RSS feed where the items have enclosure tags referencing audio or video files which are the podcast episodes. Out of the box Drupal creates enclosure tags if you upload a file, but the server on which 7gen.com is hosted doesn't have much disk space.

There are lots of social sites which facilitate sharing links to stories between the site members. They vary in form, but have a lot of similarity, with the main function being to post on a common site a story title, link, and description. A lot of traffic can be generated from these sites and thus it's useful to a website proprietor if their content gets promoted into these social sites. However there are dozens of these sites, with different mechanisms to post into each.

The Blog Theme module allows individual users to select different themes for their personal blog pages. Drupal allows easy switching of themes in that there is a theming layer which is very flexible in making the presentation of a drupal site customizable. This Blog Theme module uses that facility to allow a different theme to be used for blog postings by each user.

The Activity Stream module for Drupal is a form of aggregation for Drupal. You configure it with a list of RSS feeds and it makes copies of (new) items as postings on your site. The idea is to collect all your "activity" from across several websites and collect all that on one site.