SEO Expert Blog

This site is now running on Drupal 6, yeah! The basic part of the upgrade process was straightforward:

• Backing up the site with a backup script.
• Deactivating all contrib modules and themes.
• Moving the Drupal 5 files to a new directory.
• Unpacking Drupal 6 and contrib modules in the web root directory.
• Running the database update script.
• Activating contrib modules and themes.
• Running the database update script again.

If you plan to upgrade a Drupal site without having done so before, I highly recommend this screencast by Angie Byron. The video walks you through upgrading a site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5, but most of the information applies to a Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade as well. Also read the Upgrading Handbook.

Drupal 6 was released today. One of the most exciting new features to me — I only recently learned about — is that the AHAH (Asychronous HTML and HTTP) framework made it into the Drupal core. This means you can create asychronous HTTP request, commonly referred to as AJAX, without writing a single line of JavaScript code.

The new Forms API comes with an #ahah attribute that lets you specify the trigger event, e.g. a mouse click, the callback URL that will be requested after the event occurred and the ID value of the HTML element where the server response will be displayed. Pretty awesome stuff.

Since Facebook made it's API for developing Facebook Apps available, producing spam with Facebook is virtually inevitable, if you are an active Facebook user. Many Facebook Apps are somehow funny and entertaining, so to send hundreds or thousands of invitations and messages per day to your Facebook friends doesn't really feel like spamming.

Alas, everything seems to come back sometime. I just received a message from a Nigerian woman who wrote me a novel about her life and looks for someone or something. Since it's the first time I noticed this venerable type of spam coming through Facebook it feels a bit less spammy than usually.

I first heard about the Theme Developer module in Lullabot Podcast No. 52. This new Drupal 6 module is part of the great Devel Package, that helps developing for Drupal in many ways.

Yesterday, I watched the Theme Developer Screencast where Moshe Weitzman guides us on how to use the Theme Developer module and what can be done with it. Moshe Weitzman, Jeff Robbins, and Joon Park did nothing less than creating the Firebug for Drupal theming, wow!

It looks like Google updated the toolbar PageRank again. The Search Status Firefox extensions just informed me about that. Two of my sites, including SEO Expert Blog, each lost one point. Additionally, I tried some free online SEO tools to check what they tell me, but none of them returned any data on PageRank, so I assume that Search Status tells the truth.

The Google toolbar could help here, but I really don't want to install that Google spyware extension. Anyway, as long as the traffic that comes from the big G does not decrease, I don't give a toss about it. Even if it decreases, I won't let Google dictate how I build my websites.