michael's blog

Let me start this post by saying that I'm not an expert on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I do know the basics about Google's PageRank and keywords, but I've made it a point in the past few months to start getting to know some of the various Drupal modules that can assist in SEO.

SEO is at best an artform. If you're looking for strategies that will guarantee your site a top ranking on Google, you've come to the wrong place.

I recently completed work on the upgrade of the Zero-G Teacher site from Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. It was a fairly straight-foward upgrade, as the site doesn't require any custom modules anymore thanks to Colan Schwartz's RegCode module. I had previously hacked the excellent invite module to provide rudimentary registration code functionality, but RegCode made the hack unnecessary.

After consulting for Zero-G for well over a year now (my wife is also one of their consultants), I was finally lucky enough to fly standby on one of the flights out of the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility. The flight took place just 2 days after the historic weightless flight of Professor Stephen Hawking on the same plane.

I recently released the Organic Groups Join Role module on the Drupal web site. The module is designed to add a "join orgranic groups" permission to the main Organic Groups (OG) module .

The basic programming of the module is quite easy, as it simply overrides the Organic Groups "og/subscribe" menu item in order to add the "access" parameter:

I recently attended Drupalcon at the Open Source Content Management Summit (OSCMS) held at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California. Here's a few tidbits I wanted to pass along:

The conference keynote was given by Rasmus Lerdorf , the creator of the PHP scripting language . Rasmus's talk focused on security and demonstrated how easy it is to perform cross-site-scripting (XSS) on various CMSs. The one important rule I took away from the talk: never browse in another window/tab when you're logged in to a site you want to keep secure (banking, bill paying, etc...)

There's some really great stuff going on with video on Drupal. Both the video module and the CCK video field are making great strides.