David Herron .com

As noted in a previous blog entry, Quick look at the Package Builder module for Drupal, and prepackaged functionality, I'm associated with a gang of people thinking about creating a packaged Drupal distribution. In the previous blog entry I looked at Package Builder, and in this one I'm looking at the Features module.

The Features module has been getting a lot of attention and a couple projects are using it to neatly package up clumps of functionality to share with each other. This idea of packaging a clump of preconfigured functionality is very attractive and I think there is great potential for a marketplace of these things to form. Since DrupalCon SF I've been involved with launching a project where we want to use preconfigured packaged functionality to share with a specific community of people. Hence I'm evaluating the ways to do this packaging.

I'm at DrupalCon and am having a great time. This note is based on a talk yesterday PubSubHubbub to the rescue-- Real-time feeds and the future of social networks which gave me hope for a solution to a problem I think is vexing us all.

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.

I came to the Drupal community with (to the best of my recollection) Drupal 4.6. That makes me a sort of old timer though really there was a lot of Drupal releases before my time. In the 4.6 days most extension of Drupal meant writing modules whereas you youngsters today don't know how easy you have it with Views and CCK ... What drew me to Drupal was the tagline "Community Plumbing" as I was looking for a platform with which to build online communities or what's now known as social networking. My vision is the use of online community to create positive social change.

One of my sites has a high traffic load (2000 visits per day, over 6000 page views per day) and has been using up the bandwidth allotment on the shared hosting account where it's hosted. Concerns are that a large download per page would turn off visitors due to a long page load time, and also the environmental impact of excessive bandwidth usage. Initially the only measurement tool I had was the realtime bandwidth statistics provided by the hosting provider (see the screenshots below) and it was only later when Firebug became functional on firefox 3.5 and YSlow was then usable.

There's a long standing debate over the content of RSS feeds. For the greatest convenience of your readers the full RSS feed is great, because they can read your articles in their feed aggregator. However as a publisher who needs to earn a living from my writing I only want to publish a teaser so that the reader will feel incentivized to visit my site. For me the feed is a lure to bring people to my site, and I cannot do justice to others' viewpiont.

The core Tracker module is a convenient way to look at recent traffic on a Drupal site. It shows a list of recently posted (or modified) nodes along with useful data items for each node. However with Views 2 there is a more flexible way to implement the same functionality, without enabling another module.

The task is really pretty simple. Just download and enable the Views module, then in the Views configuration interface enable the Tracker view. Yup, coming bundled with the Views module is a predefined view which does every task the Tracker module does.

In two prior blog posts (see the references section below) I've discussed using a website content type to create resources lists. In this post I want to discuss another use, for a kind of footnoting system. You can see it in action below.