"The combination of Fetch and Render plus Search Analytics has more or less rendered Content Keywords obsolete. "
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-kills-off-content-keywords-search-console/179803/
If you're doing local listings at all, or your clients are, you may be interested in some recent tweaks to Google My Business listings:
http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900
Google announced earlier this year that they will begin counting the availability of service over the https protocol on sites as a positive factor for page rank.
Several clients have expressed concern over moving their Drupal sites to https. Drupal has no issues with this, and generally work fine over either protocol; but there's some confusion over broader issues of search, link juice, etc. and how 301s and 302s should be handled. Here's a good summary of the common questions:
https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC
Here's a quick take on an old tactic - offering free content in return for contact info.
http://imagexmedia.com/blog/2016/08/what-are-squeeze-pages-and-how-do-they-work
P.S. there's a Drupal module that makes this a little easier, though it's not hard in any case:
https://www.drupal.org/project/squeeze
Over the last couple of years, I've benefited greatly from many online course offerings. If you're in my business, you'll know how essential it is to try to keep up to date with the latest and greatest.
I'm long since past needing to be one of the cool kids; but some of the new stuff that's come along (I'm looking at you, Angular) has actually vastly improved my ability to get useful work done for clients.
Once in a while, though, it's necessary to pull back from the cutting edge, and wander into a section of the coding world that smells old and musty, and makes your lip curl.
HTML Email is just such a section.
If you've been around since, say, 1998, you'll recognize with a shudder some of the techniques that Email coders have to use every day. Tables, in fact - the rest of us long since gave up using tables for layout of anything but actual tabular data. They're hard to style, and really hard to make responsive. Sadly, they're the only strategy that will survive the preprocessor mangling that many email clients will subject your content to.
There's also the issue of what Email clients will respect which directives. Did you know, for example, that Gmail strips out any "style" links, so that you can't include remote style sheets? You can't even reliably put a bunch of CSS in your Head element. And don't get me started on Outlook, which apparently uses the perfectly atrocious MS Word rendering engine.
Many marketers get around this sort of nonsense by using online email services, especially ones with a design tool attached. Mailchimp is my personal favorite - and not just for its awesome simpatico with Drupal. Others swear by Constant Contact, Lyris, Vertical Response, etc. What these services have in common is that, to a greater or lesser degree, they help tame the beast of HTML email design. (Well, my one client's experience with Lyris isn't all that encouraging, but the others do seem to help).
However many of us still need to understand what's going on under the hood. No cloud service is perfect, and there are enough good clients using bad online email designers that there's still a role for us code monkeys. As usual, we get called when something goes sideways.
That's where Codeschool's new HTML Email course comes in.
As with all of the Codeschool courses, the format is: video lecture, followed by some exercises that you complete in their guided-learning tool. You can download the video to replay later, as well as the PDF of the content; I like to keep the PDF open while doing the exercises just so I don't have to re-watch the whole video to get that one little snippet that I forgot about.
You may choose to skip the intro musical number that Codeschool enjoys putting at the start of every video, but altogether this course adheres to Codeschool's usual high standard of presentation and content.
Who should take this course?
Anyone who's interested in not being embarrassed by spending an entire afternoon fixing up a half-page of HTML that looks like it was written in the last century.
You'll want at least a rudimentary understanding of HTML elements, media queries for Mobile, and CSS style tags. But you'll likely be able to figure it out if you're comfortable with any kind of coding or markup at all.
If not, see Codeschool's other excellent course offerings on those subjects. 
For several years, I've been using and recommending the excellent Mars Edit for folks who want to write blog posts offline for later uploading.
There are several reasons for people to want to do this - for one thing you can work on several articles at once, without having to flip between browser tabs. Also the better offline editors have good media management, allowing the user to upload images from the desktop easily, and in some cases even pull from iPhoto, or from previously published stories, without breaking the flow of writing. Even the best WYSIWYG editors that work in-browser can't quite match the ease of use and basic unobtrusiveness of a good offline editor.
One user has also points out that she feels safer having a local copy of her posts available as backup, or in case she wants to pull a bunch of posts together for a story collection or a book.
In any case, offline editors are popular, and Mars Edit is one of the best (Mac only, sorry).
So when I recently updated this site to Drupal 7, I figured everything would Just Work, as they say - silly me. There are some configuration issues on the Drupal side that have kept me busy today - nothing that was Mars Edit's fault. It all comes down to setting up BlogAPI correctly.
Just by way of background: Drupal requires the addition of the BlogAPI module in order to provide a web service that allows remote posting in the manner we're looking for here. BlogAPI will accept POST methods, authenticate the user, parse the provided xml, and create or update the node for you. It will also accept images and put them in the Drupal file hierarchy, so that they can be referenced by your post. However, these images need to be encoded as text, because of the xml-based conversation that it's having with the remote client.
Drupal uses the Movable Type API, which is quite well supported generally, and Mars Edit is smart enough to know that - so that when you set up your blog account in Mars Edit for the first time, it generally gets the settings correct.
There are a few gotchas though, and as I spent a good few hours on this, I thought I'd share:
Firstly, you need to get BlogAPI installed. Install it as you would any other Drupal module, but be sure to turn on the supporting API providers - MetaWeblog and Movable Type - in the Modules list. Apparently we need both, as some key functions seem to reside in MetaWeblog.
Next, be sure to grant permissions. This may seem obvious, but I spent a frustrating hour trying to post images as the superuser, and failing. Even if your account is UID=1, you'll still need to create a role, add yourself to it, and give it perms for BlogAPI. If you don't, you'll be able to post text just fine, but BlogAPI will refuse your images, because you won't have a valid file upload limit.
If you'd like to be able to push posts up in Draft (unpublished) status, you'll need "Administer Content" perms as well - grant that to your role, again even if you're user #1.
Finally, if you're getting complaints about the SQL schema, as I was, just uninstall BlogAPI (that means uninstalling the providers first - and I do mean uninstall at /admin/modules/uninstall, not just "turn off"). Turn BlogAPI back on again, and it will re-make the database tables it needs. You will then have to reactive the providers, and set everything up again at /admin/config/services/blogapi. I think this may have something to do with the update - perhaps the BlogAPI updater doesn't quite handle the jump from D6 to D7. Anyhow reinstalling solved it for me.
Just a short interlude to the series on CGSHR…
I've been putting off updating this blog to Drupal 7, but it's time to bite the bullet and do it on several sites I'm responsible for.
Actually this site is simple enough that the data migration was quite straightforward; the time-consuming part of it was the re-making of the theme, since themes can't really be upgraded as such. Good opportunity to make the theme a bit more responsive, anyhow.
One odd glitch was the scrambling of the Administration menu - items disappeared, other items turned up in the wrong place, etc. No amount of re-installing the Admin menu module, rebuilding the menu cache, etc. was of any help.
It turns out this was a known issue (see this d.o post). After hacking some stuff out of the MySQL database as per a suggestion here, the Admin menu was back to normal.
Now that that's done, it's on to Resonetrics.com...
The new site for
The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights had its "soft-launch" yesterday. The site is live and usable, but the owners still have a few things they'd like to tweak.
Little do they know, web sites are never really finished - so for all intents and purposes, this is the real thing.
Probably the most interesting part of the project from my point of view was the heavy customization of Apache Solr search results, and the whole search experience. This was mostly accomplished via templates in the site's theme. I'll share a few details in case anyone's interested.
To begin with, this is a Drupal site - specifically D7. The owners had an initial design and a sort of prototype site built by a previous developer in D7, which they handed off to me. That work was done cleanly and competently, but it was clear the client wanted to go so much further than the original builder was prepared to go. I'm not sure what transpired, though I did have a friendly chat with them, but in any case they were out of the picture by the time I got involved.
When I received the site, the first thing I did was to stage it on my Drupion server. Drupion are like family to me, and I've trusted them to help me grow my Drupal business, so it was an easy pick. When the client agreed to host with me for production, that made the decision that much more rational.
Drupion got Solr and Tika set up right away. Solr is a much more powerful search tool than the built-in Drupal search, capable of handling a very large number of indexable items. More info on that here. It runs as a separate server process, and needs about half a Gig of RAM. Tika is an add-on to Solr, which allows searching inside documents such as Word, PDF and other files that are not normally presentable on the web. The client has quite a number of academic research papers and other documents in these formats, so the ability to search inside them was essential.
Once Solr was running and had started indexing the site's content, we looked at what Facets to use for searches. Facets are basically filters - they allow you to limit searches to, say, one content type, or a particular taxonomy term.
Above, you can see the some of the facets for the overall site search Here we've searched for "Gender" - a term guaranteed to return lots of results on this site.
On the left are check boxes that allow the user to narrow down the search to a particular Country, Region, etc. There's also a facet for Content type. On this site, content types mostly correspond to the type of document or media being shown - Citations, Research, Films, etc.
But you can restrict your search to one content type equally well by using the tabs along the top of the main content area - Films, Lectures, etc.
Clicking one of these will retain the same search terms, but narrow your results down to a single content type (if you want to search 2 content types, you'll have to use the checkboxes on the "All" tab).
In order to get these individual tabs implemented, I set up a separate search environment for each of the key content types. This allowed me to set facets and Bias for each (which we may want to leverage later).
Next, I made pages for each content type. Each Page has its own title, and most of them (except "All") are limited to a particular Bundle (bundles are essentially content types, at the machine level. Check out D7's Entity system for more info). Because they all have paths that look like /search/--bundle--, they're showing up as tabs on the /search page. Neat :-)
In my next post I'll show how Facet blocks are set up, and talk about theming the search results. Finally, I'll show some of the Views on the site, which offer more of a browsing experience, which I think complements the Search pages nicely.