Book Review: Drupal 6 Themes

Submitted by patrick on Tue, 10/13/2009 - 18:44
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Drupal is a widely adopted open source Content Management System. For it's users, this wide adoption brings a number of advantages like, for example, well maintained code and ready to use solutions to many standard problems, but there is also one inherent disadvantage.
Out of the box, every Drupal installation looks the same. Being indistinguishable from other websites is a no-go in the web 2.0 world. Contributed themes may lessen this problem to a degree, but even they reach their limits, when corporate design becomes a requirement.

Page Rank still has a real purpose and value

Submitted by patrick on Sat, 08/22/2009 - 17:17
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I just saw a video of a talk, Matt Cutts, head of Google's anti web spam team, gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. I can only recommend watching listening to it (sadly, audio only), since it's as entertaining as informative and covers a lot of topics potentially relevant to bloggers.
Among other things, Matt also addresses Google Page Rank and gives away one of it's applications.

Release Notes: GiftedMotion (1.17)

Submitted by patrick on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 10:27
Posted in
Spec Sheet
Name: 
GiftedMotion
Version: 
1.17
Download: 
http://www.onyxbits.de/giftedmotion


- Added "duplicate" feature to copy a loaded frame (handy for making
ABABABA style animations, when only the two input files A and B exist).
- Change the mousecursor to an hourglass symbol while exporting the animation.

Unintentionally linking to a bad neighborhood - how to be taken for a ride by black hat SEO

Submitted by patrick on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 16:19
Posted in

My website is a fun project for me. I just love working on it and watching it grow day by day.
Speaking of watching it grow, I am also someone, who actually reads web server logs just to see, whats going on. One thing, I am particularly interested in are the HTTP referrers. After all, which website owner would not want to know, where his visitors are coming from? Curiously, some of mine seem to be coming from porn websites, "make money fast" blogs and other shady places.

Time to rework my strategy for adding AdSense to Drupal blogs

Submitted by patrick on Sat, 08/15/2009 - 15:26
Posted in

I recently had the epiphany, that Drupal's Blog module is not that great for blogging after all, at least not if you are using your website mainly as a single user blog, like I do.

Release Notes: GiftedMotion (1.16)

Submitted by patrick on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 10:40
Posted in
Spec Sheet
Name: 
GiftedMotion
Version: 
1.16
Download: 
http://www.onyxbits.de/giftedmotion


- Fixed logo not displaying in window title and taskbar.

Ethical investment goof up

Submitted by patrick on Sat, 08/01/2009 - 23:15
Posted in

Headline: "Catholic church invests in tobacco, arms and birth control pills".

Sounds too unbelievable to be true? Well, not entirely. According to this article on spiegel.de, the German Pax bank, one of the four catholic church banks in North Rhine-Westphalia did exactly that.

According to the article, the following investments were made:

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Book Review: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Submitted by patrick on Fri, 07/31/2009 - 10:47
Posted in

Drupal is a very powerful and feature rich content management framework with hundreds of contributed modules, extending it's core functionality. However, even with all of those third party add-ons, a lot of website owners will sooner or later find themselves in a situation, where a desired service can only be implemented by creating a custom module.

When it comes to module development, Drupal's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage.

Don't use Drupal's blog module unless you intent to build a blog hosting site

Submitted by patrick on Thu, 07/23/2009 - 22:22
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Update: If you came here looking for pointers on using Drupal for blogging, you might be interested in this guide for howto blog with Drupal instead. This blog post really is only about not making a beginners mistake.

How the stock market conjures up money out of thin air

Submitted by patrick on Wed, 07/22/2009 - 22:12
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Since I had to explain it anyway, I can put just as well write it down here in my blog. The question, I was asked was, how the stock market can magically generate money out of thin air and the short answer is: It cannot, but psychology can be used as a means to redistribute existing wealth.
There is no such thing as an intrinsic value. The value of any object depends on it's scarcity and our desire to own it. By manipulating desire for and the availability of an object, it's value can either be increased or decreased.

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