David Herron .com

Looking at the traffic data google Analytics collects on my web sites I see a high "bounce" rate which means many visitors leave right away. It means they come to the site, then look only at the one page, presumably to go elsewhere. I've been pondering what might be a good way to entice them to stay and look around. After all, my websites exist to instruct people, so the more pages they look at on my sites the more instruction I'm able to impart. Oh, and there's a higher chance they'll click on an ad or something.

In the Drupal community there's a paradigm that every time you hack core you kill a kitten. And who would want to kill a kittens? The point is that any time you hack core (modify the Drupal core files) it becomes a nightmare to forward-migrate your changes as Drupal core is updated. The Drupal team does routinely update Drupal (about every 2 months) and it's best to keep your Drupal installation up-to-date especially as many of the fixes are for security bugs.

It's useful to view the items loaded just by the specific feed. For example it's common in blog or podcast directories to list teasers for items on the "Source" page. The 'Feed' content type that comes with FeedAPI doesn't support listing the items on the same page, however. There is a link, in the links for the Feed content type, to "feed-item/#" that is intended to link to the items loaded by the feed, but this seems to give an error page.

Create a view to list the items

I've been having a headscratcher on a website for awhile and just found what the problem is. PROBLEM: When cron.php is requested, instead of running cron.php it redirects to some page on the site. This means the cron hooks aren't executed because instead some other page gets loaded. Drupal does a lot of maintenance stuff in the cron hooks, so it's bad news if they don't get executed.

Documentation of the normal setup for cron.php: http://drupal.org/cron .. I had done all that, and their troubleshooting section did not cover the problem I had.

MAMP makes it pretty darn simple to do web development on a Mac. While Mac OS X comes bundled with Apache and PHP, MAMP bundles together the latest versions of both along with MySQL. It "installs a local server environment in a matter of seconds on your Mac OS X computer" and is completely self-contained. You can run MAMP alongside the Apache that's built-in to Mac OS X, you can remove MAMP at any time, etc. It's very convenient and flexible.

I've upgraded and updated my Drupal installs a zillion times. A strange error has occurred on the last couple of them which has me scratching my head. I want to share some observations in the hope it will help some others..

Upon applying the updates and running update.php I get this error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: phptemplate_get_ie_styles() in .../themes/garland/maintenance-page.tpl.php on line 23

One of the chores which comes with running a Drupal website is keeping the drupal install and contributed modules up to date. Prior to the Available Updates feature (itself a contributed module in Drupal 5 and core drupal in Drupal 6) this was a manual process. You'd occasionally browse the contributed modules list on drupal.org and hopefully you remember all the installed modules. With the Available Updates feature the system notifies you when your modules are out of date, and it tells you which one. But you still need to do a few things.

You want to put advertising on your web site, and one easy simple way is to sign up for affiliate programs. In many cases affiliate programs offer some kind of banner advertisement you can display, and rather than paying out per pageview the affiliate programs of course pay if the user does something like click on an ad and then buy something. It's easy to become signed up with dozens of programs and if so it then becomes tricky to manage the advertisements.