The Dubli Business Model

Today, one of my business mentors had me review a business opportunity needing online traffic – Dubli. A friend of his is serious about undertaking this venture, all ready to dive in. My input in this area was sought, for my ability to drive online traffic to a Dubli network site, similar to this one.

Why LinkedIN? My Top Ten Reasons

Myspace, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Youtube, LinkedIN – I am an active member of all these sites, but I spend most of my “available” Web 2.0 time on LinkedIn. Here are my top ten reasons with some introspection on why I give LinkedIN this honor:

Google analytics for largescale ecommerce site

Do you have a large-scale ecommerce site or do you want to build a large-scale ecommerce website? If you have a large number of products or services to sell, the management of these sites requires good organization skills and record keeping. You can sell more products or services online once you know what your customers are looking for. Google Analytics with urchin provides a lot of web analysis capability, when installed correctly.

Lend Directly To a Person in Need

If you want to help a poor person in a developing or third world, giving to charities is not the answer.  Money soon runs out and the person is now dependent on that charitable offering again (most likely). Not if you have a plan to do something with the funds - like create a business. Well that is what Kiva does. It is a lending organization that enables people like you and me to give to person who is in need. They have third party organizations that vet the claims and uses of funds for these individuals. Typical borrower is looking at buying a cow, buy products for a local store or fix a taxi for his/her business. You can read about the stories of these people and give in increments of $25. These funds are returned in the future as the person is building credit!

How to Add Email Subscription To Your Drupal Blog

This a $700 dollar video! I got an email from a reader of SeoEcom that she had a quote of $700 to add an email subscription to her drupal blog site. If you can follow along to this video, you can learn how to

1. Use Drupal Views to create an RSS View for all your blogs (or any content you want to RSS on your site)
2. Burn the feed at Feedburner and use all the advanced tracking and email subscription features of a Feedburner feed
3. Enable email subscriptions to your blog for your Drupal site

Please follow along to the videos on how to do this. First off you need to download Drupal Views (required) and Feedburner redirector (optional). Unzip the files and use your FTP application to install these modules on your Drupal site. Once these modules are installed you will need to enable them and then you can start to define your view.

Using RSS Feeds filetype:rss

Almost once a month I get question on RSS, what it is, how to read rss feeds and should I use rss. This blog answers this question. First let’s start with what it is:

RSS is a technology that allows millions of web users around the world keep track of the latest information on their favorite websites. If you use bookmarks to revisit your favorite websites, chances are you are wasting time. You may visit a site only to find no new updates. Or you may miss a critical piece of information because you didn’t visit the site in time. 

Here is a really good video that explains RSS in simple terms:

Use Google Products To Enhance Your Local Business

If you have not heard or used Google maps yet, let me tell you, it is a lot of fun! You can zoom in and out of locations and privacy issues have been questioned. But its still a useful tool and has many uses apart from the obvious.

With the popularity of mobile browsing, having your business listed in Google Local/Maps has its advantages. Businesses that have a local brick and mortar business benefits from being listed here.

Did you know that a local business listed in Google Maps comes up in search results if a user searches for a business in that particular location? In other words, you do not need a website to appear in Google search results locally, if you are registered this way.

What are the chances of a customer typing in "pizza, Richmond" in the Google search box? Very high. Or "dentist, melbourne"? High again.

Some Common Drupal “Problems” And How to Solve Them

Hi, I am Alec and this is my first blog post. I have been working with Drupal for the past 3 years now and I am passionate about it. In the next few months, I will be writing a series of articles on common problems/ issues encountered by first time Drupal users from time to time.

I have made a list of five and in the coming months, will add more to this list:

1.)The first most common one encountered might be: “Forgot the admin password. What do I do next?"

A simple solution would be to just go to yoursite.com/user/password and follow instructions.

What if for some reason the mail didn’t come due to your Junk mail filter, or you have not installed Drupal mail function. Here are some possibilities, one, you have simply forgotten which email address was used for the admin account, or the mail address that was used no longer exist.

5 Common Drupal Mistakes You Can Avoid

This is a list of the most common mistakes I have encountered in my daily Drupal work. It can seem like obvious things for the daily Drupal hacker, but are nevertheless commonly seen when working on projects someone else has started or maintained.

Drupal Security

Drupal uses an open security model, to publish vulnerabilities, issue patches for known vulnerabilities and get independent audit of security issues using third party tools and its vast community.  With over 4000s contributed modules, the practices of Drupal.org, with it’s open security model, make it one of the most secure platforms to do business online and leverage community contribution toward a secure platform.

For the average Drupal site all that needs to be done is to keep its modules up-to-date and also the Drupal core version, which as of this writing is Drupal 6.12 and 5.18. Some deployments of Drupal have massive changes to the core, which should be an expecption managed by the client (that engages in the development effort, understands risks and alternatives)  – that if changes are made to the core or to a contributed module, then there is an strategy in place to test the site for various security issues, independently of Drupal.