Growing Venture Solutions

I recently saw a comment about Pathauto and started writing a really long reply that seemed more valuable to share here.

Basically one of the questions people have is “Why should I use Pathauto? If I don’t care about SEO is there any other reason?”

This is a valid question to me. There is some indication that users don’t look at the URL bar. During the Usability testing at UMN we never noticed people looking at the URL bar in the eye-tracking data. But some people certainly do look at the URL bar - people who like “hackable urls” do

Hackable URLs

I use it extensively to create “hackable URLs” that are valuable to a user. A “hackable url” or “index alias” is the feature on a site where you have a post and then users can remove the title down to the previous URL element and get the other posts from that month, one more layer for the year, and one more for that user since forever. See - fun! I even made a movie about it:

Site Credibility Prior to the Click

I frequently get URLs sent to me via email and IM. Compare these two URLs:

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/node/38

vs.

http://drupalcampcolorado.org/content/our-sponsors

Which one are you more likely to click on? Which one helps you understand what content you are going to get before you even get there?

Easy to Remember URLs

I recently took the Benchmark Survey from the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum. I have to say, I was surprised by the ease of the survey and the value of the analysis provided inside of the interface.

About the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum

The Entrepreneurial Standards Forum is a non-profit that aims to help entrepreneurs get their businesses started. So often businesses will focus on the wrong things, but they don’t know that they were focusing on the wrong things until it is too late and they are already out of business. The Benchmark Survey has the data to be able to say which factors are important to success.

One great value in the survey is that it is meant to be taken at multiple points (or at the same time with different viewpoints). So, I took it from the perspective of this business 2 years ago. The survey itself was fairly painless - just a few simple background questions and a few business questions that tickled my brain a little. The results are very valuable and easy to understand.

This screenshot has some information removed from it, but you can still understand what it’s getting across: your answers compared to the answers of previously successful entrepreneurs. Very powerful stuff. If you are interested in how your business compares, register and take the survey.

I recently received the following email and thought it would be good to share my answer.

To your knowledge is it acceptable to drop the use of www. before your web site?

This is not only acceptable, there are some people who feel that it’s valuable to stop doing it in general.

However, the answer really depends on the context of the question.

Using www. in Email Clients

Send an email to yourself with the following text:

1) example.com
2) www.example.com
3) http://www.example.com
4) http://example.com

For me, the third and fourth are automatically formatted as clickable links but the first and second are not. So, the third and fourth are more likely to be noticed and clicked on by users of email software like mine. This is, of course, dependent on how and where people read their emails and varies wildly.

Also, as your eye scans through a body of text the second one is easier to recognize than the first one. However, some people feel that for emails the third format is disruptively long.

WWW or not For Search Engines

Another consideration has to do with search engine performance. If you have some links to your site that point to both versions this can confuse the search engines about your site. Most search engines have figured this out or provide tools to tell them which one is the “right” one, but it’s best not to have the problem at all. You can use a “301 redirect” to forward the users (and search engines) to your preferred version and prevent the problem in the first place. If you are unsure how to do this, your website developer should be able to help you.

Final Decision on WWW or not?

This is a pseudo transcript I took of the Hivelive podcast from ColoradoStartups.com. When I read about HiveLive I was really curious because they are basically a hosted provider of a “social publishing platform” and it just so happens that I’m a developer who uses an Open Source “social publishing platform”.

John Kembel’s history:

• design consulting firm (like ideo)
• dodots - thin client browser/widgets before Dashboard was cool
• hivelive: “enterprise social software”
  • tap into power of social networks
  • marketing communication vehicles
  • amplify lead generation, insights, support
  • flexible, cost effective, on demand, platform

2006 Founded Hivelive

• Existing solutions are social software packages (blogs, wikis, forums)
• They were either overly generic or inflexible
• They didn’t allow sharing
• HiveLive is a unified platform - permissions and content richness “not just blogs/wikis/forums” for sharing

Existing Solutions vs. HiveLive

• One common approach is to stitch together lots of technologies
• People take a blogging platform, a separate wiki, a separate forum, social networking and try to build build unified package
• The results are not good
• So, don’t staple together a bunch of solutions
• HiveLive: Start with social networking, add on “hives” to share information

Why is social networking important to businesses?

• humans are social
• communities where socialization is part, but rather than being the focus, the business is the focus
• tie business to customers - delivers lead generation, loyalty, insights, support all in one trust based relationship

HiveLive Competitors?

• Hivelive is different in that they use building block rather than integrating point solutions
• Configuration is via “clicking not coding”

Ever quarter I try to munge and analyze the download data. The data for January is now available. Views continues its reign at the top of the module list. Images and WYSIWYG remain popular. Popular themes continue to be dominated by those that start with letters at the beginning of the alphabet.

Most Popular Drupal Modules

These are the slides from the security presentation. Visit the s5 version to see them as a presentation.

The Pathauto module is a rather popular one for Drupal. In November Pathauto 5.x-2.0 was released which included a restructuring of several features to add new features and enhance scalability. There have been almost 50 bugfixes and features added between 5.x-2.0 and 5.x-2.1. See the release page for full details.

I wanted to blog about this for a few reasons.

Pathauto Configuration/UI Changes

First, there was a change to the UI in the way that feed aliases are handled to better support the use of Views for taxonomy feeds. I’ve udpated this in the upgrade guide (which, especially for folks upgrading from 5.x-1 or 4.7, should be required reading). There were also several improvements to the UI to simplify it and help people figure out which token is the right one to use. This was a major problem with the 2.0 release so I hope that the 2.1 will be easier to use. There is still room for improvements but…

Comaintainer and Maintenance Status

Second, this release is likely to be the last for a while. Now that this 5.x branch is more stable I plan to spend some time working on the 6.x branch to get a stable release of that. I’d also love a co-maintainer which mikeryan has offered to help which would take the module full circle to its author. I’m broadcasting this here to be a responsible maintainer given that I have less bandwidth in the coming months to dedicate to Pathauto because…

Prediction Market Module

I like building modules.

This is a list of modules which I have contributed code to with the number of commits to each project.

• Pathauto (542 commits)
• Token (59 commits)
• S5 presentation player (50 commits)
• Prediction Markets (41 commits)
• microsummary (17 commits)
• Omniture Integration (15 commits)
• Meez Integration (8 commits)
• Nofollow List (3 commits)
• TextLinkAds.com Integration (2 commits)
• CCK Latitude Longitude module (7 commits)
• Porter-Stemmer (1 commit)

There are many other modules and themes I have built which are not publicly available because they are only used on a specific site.

Examples of specific modules/configurations I have built for private sites include:

• A webservices module that integrates with the CCK Address Field and CCK LatLon modules to get LatLon data for Addresses
• A grant application workflow that validated and moved applications through a review process where different judges would rate the grants.
• User integration between Drupal and a third party user database.

I was recently asked how I create the screencasts on this site. This has been an evolving process.

Wink from Debugmode

I used a piece of software called Wink to create the screencasts. It has the benefit of providing the “next/previous” widgets which are nice. A drawback is that it creates snapshots of the screen in bitmap and then merges them together into flash. So, you can only use the Wink editor to edit the screencasts.

CamTasia - Full Featured, Full Price

For a Drupal Dojo Session about CVS I used the CamTasia recording system. It was pretty good, but is quite expensive. I don’t think the price is justified in the features that it offers. CamTasia is basically an all-in-one solution which is great in a lot of ways, but, as often happens with all-in-one solutions, it isn’t the best in many ways.

Krut - Cross platform Java Recorder

For my own projects, I now use Krut which is cross-platform and creates regular movies/sound files which you can then edit using standard movie editors. The drawback to standard movies is the lack of “next/previous” navigation - but most movie players will give you a progress slider which is good enough.

Voice Recording

I had been using just a plain old headset/microphone combo unit which I used also for VOIP calls. I now have a Rode Podcaster and use a pop filter which makes it super easy to provide high quality sound.

Drupal Project Module History and Future

The Drupal Project Module is one of the oldest non-core modules that is still in active development and use on sites around the world. The core developers of Drupal are committed to using this module as the controller for “projects” hosted on Drupal itself. There are many people who like Drupal and want to use it to create a system for hosting projects. Two such projects that I’m aware of include the QCodo QForge and the future plans for JQuery.com as mentioned in the Lullabot podcast 21: interview with JQuery founder John Resig.

Help the Project Module Move Forward

Because the Project module is so old, it did things in ways that are not standard for Drupal. This makes it relatively unpopular for use on other sites as it lacks several important features. There are several particularly nasty bugs and Derek Wright (dww) has signed up to maintain Project module and tackle these bugs so that the Project module will get more attention and use around the world. More attention means more improvements, which means that one of the key pieces of Drupal’s infrastructure can really start to shine and enable development rather than being a “I guess we have to use it” kind of feature.

So, if you use Drupal you should want to help the project module. It’s important. It’s a feature that lots of people want, and it has someone interested in making it better. Derek has setup a page explaining this in more detail and you are encouraged to give him more money. Read more about his plan and follow the link to donate. As of writing, Derek is at a little over $1000. That’s a great start, but still pretty far from the desired end point.

Growing Venture Solutions, LLC gave funds thing to help with the process and to make sure that this module moves forward. Won’t you do the same?