by gregoryheller | Dec 22, 2008 | Uncategorized
Back in January I posted a blog about my carbon footprint for 2007. With 36 flights spanning nearly 70,000 miles, I had calculate my carbon footprint at a little bit more than 14 tons of CO2, turns out I had some bad numbers in there and overestimated it by maybe 2 or 3 tons. From my testing, I’ve found different carbon calculators calculate CO2 footprint of air travel differently, you might want to try a few (I’ve listed some at the bottom of this post.) UPDATE: So i ran the numbers again, and they are, to say the least, contradictory. TerraPass’s carbon calculator (averaging .4 lbs CO2/Mile for my 2007 travel, and .31 for 2008 travel) gives be a footprint half that of Native Energy’s (averaging .8 lbs CO2/Mile). I’ll continue to look into this and post a comment or a blog entry if I find out anything more). So, even though the year is not done, the numbers are in. With 40 flights, 56,110 miles traveled by air I weigh in at 17,651 pounds of CO2 or almost 9 tons (according to Terrapass, and 25 tons according to Native Energy). So I am not sure whether to call this progress or not. As you can see, I didn’t fly less, I just didn’t fly as far. The big difference was that this year I did not fly to Europe. I’ll call it progress, and I hope to be able to make reductions again in the coming year. This year I’ve decided I am going to take a hybrid approach to offsetting my footprint and bought 10 tons of...
by gregoryheller | Dec 18, 2008 | Uncategorized
Drupal Project founder Dries Buytaert’s recent blog post on Contributing Back to Drupal came on the heals of much discussion of the same topic while I was the Lullabot DIWD Seminar. It is not a new conversation, at CivicActions we have been having it for as long as I can remember. The Community Stipend Program Recognizing that it was hard for our company as a company to “give back” beyond our sponsorship of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps we have made efforts to empower all of our team members to give back. A big part of this is our Community Work Stipend Program which we started in 2006. Team members who achieve a threshold of client work each month earn an additional stipend to do “community work”. This can take the form of maintaining modules, working on patches for contrib or core, organizing or presenting at Drupal events like camps, cons or user groups, or writing documentation. Bevan described the benefits of the Community Work Stipend this way: CivicActions’ support and community stipend have empowered me to participate in the Drupal community in ways I had never thought possible. My Season of Usability project, Google Summer of Code mentoring, and my involvement with usability testing would not have been possible without CivicActions’ support, both financially and motivationally. As Bevan points out, the Community Stipend program has been used to support participation in the Google Summer Of Code program, and team members have also used the Community Stipend to support their participation in the DrupalDojo, and as the Dojo “revives” we expect to see more team members leading Dojo sessions in the...
by gregoryheller | Dec 17, 2008 | Uncategorized
In this fifth and final article in our series on creating an SEO strategy we will tackle the topic of community. Websites are not like the “field of dreams” — if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Certainly if you do everything right up to this point: write good content, use appropriate markup and install the right Drupal modules, the search engines will index your site. However, when you start receiving quality inbound links is when your organic search results will increase exponentially. The first weeks after you open to the public can be one of the most daunting aspects of building and launching a Web site. You’ve already contributed lots of time, money and effort to get your site up and running (or you’ve done it for a client) and undoubtedly a stakeholder asks “Why isn’t it at the top of Google?” The answer is that it takes time! However, if you develop a community strategy to drive traffic to your site and garner inbound links, you will stand a pretty good chance of seeing your site rise in the search results ranking. What do we mean by community strategy? Your Web site does not exist within a vacuum. There are other sites that operate in the same sector, or cover the same topics as yours. You have site visitors, and content contributors. All of these make up the community around your site, just as in a small town there are people you know well, and some you don’t. In every category there are the people who are “influencers” — the folks that people trust for information...
by gregoryheller | Dec 9, 2008 | Uncategorized
In Part 3 of Creating An SEO Strategy we discussed ways of writing better HTML markup in your content. In this part of the series, we will discuss some Drupal specific modules and tips, as well as other resources for learning more about SEO. Drupal Configuration Set your website name and slogan turn on clean urls Setup custom error pages for 403 and 404: this is super simple, create a page, call it “Error 404” and another called “Error 403” put some helpful text on there, or even use the Google Webmaster Tools “Search This Site” widget. Then go to /admin/settings/error-reporting and enter the urls for these two pages. Use semantic url names (meaningful plain English) for your Views and Panels url paths. For example, if you have a view that shows recipes, give the view the url “/recipes”. Make sure to title all of your views and panels with descriptive and relevant titles. Drupal Modules In this section I highlight what I believe are the 5 most important modules that improve SEO for Drupal Sites. They are also pretty easy to install and configure, even if you don’t know much about writing code, or theming, with the exception of Page Title, these modules are configured solely through the GUI, and are all easily installed. Path Auto The Path Auto Module allows you to programatically create URL Aliases for your nodes. If you install and configure just one module to improve your site’s SEO, this one is it. You will need to enable the Path module (which is part of core) and also install and enable the Token Module....
by gregoryheller | Dec 8, 2008 | Uncategorized
Early (far too early) Tuesday morning I am heading to New Orleans for Do It With Drupal, the Lullabot training conference. I’m totally psyched for the trip, not just because I can’t wait to see so many Drupalistas and see what other folks have got cookin’ with Drupal, but also because I love New Orleans. When I used to work for ACORN, we traveled to New Orleans every December for a national conference. I visited a few more times for Vintage Scooter Rallies in 2004 and 2006. In February of 2007, CivicActions held one of our full team retreats in the Garden District, and spent a day volunteering with Habitat For Humanity in the 9th Ward. Most recently I visited the Crescent City for the NTEN NTC in March. The city’s recovery has been slow, but every event and conference that take place there help the locals, and help move the city closer to recovery. If you’re going to DIWD and don’t already, follow me on Twitter, I know plenty of interesting places in the French Quarter and beyond and look forward to meeting you and sharing. I also encourage folks attending to patronize as many local shops as possible, resist the temptation to go to Starbucks, and instead take a walk over to Cafe Dumond in the French Quarter, or Rue de la Course if you are in the Garden District. Grab a Po Boy from Verti Marte. For those in town early, there is an art Biennial, Prospect.1 New Orleans, Prospect.1 New Orleans [P.1], the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States,...
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