In Drupal complex tasks can be very easy.  Sadly many times simple tasks can be complex.  Even more often, to make a complex task simple, you have to make a simple task complex first.  Such is the case with the content profile module.  Note, this example uses Drupal 6.

Why Do I Want Content Profile?

The content profile module allows you to define a content type to represent your users profiles.  This allows a tremendous amount of customization without dealing with code.  You can use the CCK to define very complex node types to represent your users profiles.  We will get to doing that later, unfortunately getting to the point where your content profiles look like…well…profiles takes a bit of doing.  Be aware that there are many ways to do Profiles in Drupal and this is just one option, be sure you need this flexibility before you start down this path.

Setting Up Content Profile

First of course you have to install the content profile module and the CCK.  You’re on your way now.  Once the module is installed it will have created a profile content type.   Great.  Unfortunately you have a bunch of steps to go before it is usable at all.  The first thing we need to do is designate that it’s a profile type by going to Administer->Content Types->Profile->Edit. In the last section, “Content Profile,” you will find a checkbox that reads “Use this content type as a content profile for users.”

Unfortunately of course a normal user can’t edit this content type, so go to Administer->User Management->Permissions and give your logged in users permissions to create and edit thier own Profile content.  You do not want them to be able to edit other people’s content so do not give them the “edit any profile content” permission.

So you’d think we’d be close to done now, but if you now go and try to edit your profile you’ll see there’s a required title field.  Even more annoyingly the only way to get rid of it is to add another module, the Automatic Node Titles module.  Once you install this you go to the profile content type (Administer->Content Types->Profile->Edit again) and you’ll see a section at the top called “Automatic Title Generation.”  Open that and set the option to “Automatically generate the title and hide the title field.”  I don’t see any reason to care what the title will be since it will be used inside another page anyway so I don’t worry about setting any other options.

Now we’ve got it to where it’s reasonable to edit.  You can go fill out the body field (as if it were a bio for example) and save and you’ll see it on your profile.  Unfortunately you’ll also see a bloody “Submitted by X on …” line at the top of it.   Great!  To get rid of that go to Themes->Global Settings and in the upper right hand corner you’ll see a list of content types inside a box labeled “Display post information on.”  Remove Profile and voila!  We’ve managed to make an absolutely boring profile in Drupal with just 10 semi-easy steps.

Now you might be wondering why we went through all that trouble just to get a really bland profile that looks decent.  The reason is because now that we’ve gotten a content profile set up and looking right, we can do the very complex task of making cool custom profiles very easily.  We’ll address that later, but this should at least get you through the frustrating act of getting the initial profile set up.  Let me know if anything needs clarification or if you disagree with anything.

Photo Credit: misteraitch

 
Have you been wondering what all the fuss about social media is?  You’ve maybe registered for Digg, submitted one of your stories and nothing came of it.  Seems like a waste of time, well…yes and no.

Social Media Is About Community

I had read this time and again.  As I am wont to do before I so much as joined any of these sites, I read everything I could.  They all agreed on one thing, if you just go on to a social media site, submit your links and wait for the visitors to roll in you’re wasting your time.  This of course makes perfect sense, you have no reputation, so how can they even tell you from a spammer?  You’re not looking to add value to the community, so why would anyone take you seriously?  It all makes sense.

Unfortunately, There is a Corollary

Sadly, this isn’t the end of the story.  In my tale, I joined Digg, didn’t submit anything of my own for several weeks, made clever comments that were voted up on lots of threads, dugg interesting articles.  Then one day I submitted one of my own stories and of course…no one read it.  It’s not that people read my article and disregarded it, it’s that no one even bothered to read it.  Ultimately Digg was a huge disappointment.

Digg is Too Big

Getting into the Digg “elite” seems like a full time job.  However there are tons of smaller communities out there where you can make an impact immediately.  I just get a few of my friends to join one with me and then I submit my stuff there.  People actually read it because it’s a smaller community and it’s much easier to get on the front page.  This actually drives traffic and seems like a much better strategy.  Moreover, it’s easier to network with those people because the “elite” isn’t nearly as well defined so you can make friends and expand your circle, instead of just begging people to vote for you.

Ultimately getting on the front page of smaller sites doesn’t yield to as many readers as getting on the front page of Digg.  But I’ve gotten way more value out of contributing to those sites than I have with Digg.  Moreover, I tend to only bother with sites that are dofollow, so at the worst case I have a link to show for it, even if I get no traffic.  Plus the administrators of those sites are usually grateful for a worthwhile contributing member (and his or her friends), instead of imperious.  All in all it’s a win-win.

Photo by: ivanx

Photo By: NightRPStar

A while back we were mystified by the results we found with our tests of Stumbleupon. We’ve since concluded that our results stemmed from Stumbleupon’s advanced utilities to prevent people from “Stumbling” their own content.  The question that arises in my mind is:

Why Have Functionality To Prevent People From Stumbling Their Own Content?

So clearly Stumbleupon identified that the same group of people Stumbled our first and second submissions, so they didn’t show it to many, or maybe even any, other people. The pivotal question is: why? Why are they so concerned with preventing people from Stumbling their own work. Isn’t the whole point of their service that people in the aggregate decide if the content is worthwhile? If I submit several pieces of content and they aren’t any good, they shouldn’t go very far. Perhaps they should have spent less time discouraging self-submission, and more time making their promotion algorithm more advanced?

What’s Better About Digg?

It should first be noted that both Stumbleupon and Digg suffer from the same downfall, users who have ADD. Stumblers or Diggers might read your article, but the potential for them to become avid readers of your blog is pretty low. If they got their entertainment from reading just a few blogs they wouldn’t be on those services in the first place.

So why use either? Here’s a simple experiment. Go Digg one of your deep pages and wait a few weeks. Then search for the title of the article. There’s a good chance that the Digg page will outrank your original article. Moreover, in that Digg page, there is a Do-Follow link to your original article. While it kind of sucks that it’s outranking our article, if you could get some more inbound links from elsewhere you’d be moving.

Is This Another Anti-NoFollow Rant?

I will spare you the “nofollow” rant today. Everyone should know my feelings about “nofollow” by now. Instead I will convey an interesting anecdote about Digging your own pages. During my article marketing test I wrote an article titled “Learn To Read Stock Market Quotes.” If you search for it, my article currently shows up as results 2-4. Your milage may vary. Not long ago a spam blog “syndicated the story” (stripping the link back to me as spam blogs are wont to do) and dug it. The digg page ranked 5th and the spam blog was nowhere to be seen. So you can see that there is some benefit to be had by digging your own story.

Secondarily, your Digg profile can also have dofollow links back to your sites. So they actually reward you for participating in their community (a lost concept these days.) They also do not frown on submitting your own story, although you’ll usually do better if someone else submits it. While Digg has it’s own set of problems, it is vastly superior to Stumbleupon for promoting your work.

We’ve written before about the importance of relationship building. I think that quite simply it is one of the key differentiators between success and failure in any space. If you can make some kind of collaborative work relationship with the right people you can succeed. However making those relationships can be very difficult.

Twitter gives us a chance to simplify the hardest part. I quite frequently send e-mails to bloggers or website owners to see if we can collaborate. Unfortunately that e-mail basically boils down to “Hey will you be my friend?” It’s hard to phrase that in a way to not sound desperate and give the impression that you have value to bring to the table. Twitter helps brush all of that out of the way.

When you join Twitter you have people who you “follow” and people who “follow you.” So basically as soon as you join you can just start “following” people who are in your space. Almost no one has so many twitter “friends” that they don’t notice a new follower, so they come check you out. Usually if they like you they follow you back, and bingo! You’ve skipped the whole uncomfortable “can we be friends” phase.

This lets you get down to immediately starting to “vet” each other and see if you can “take the relationship further.” I know all this metaphorical language sounds creepy, which is exactly why Twitter is so useful. You don’t have to figure out a way to approach people without being creepy, which, sadly, is not easy for me.

Not too long ago we did a quick article on stock photos. I really didn’t have much of a problem with the results we were getting, however I was reading an article on skelliewag.org about how she uses flickr to get pictures and thought we might give it a try here. You should read the article but the the gist is:

• It’s easy to find photos on flickr, which I’ve found to be quite true.
• Only use photos under the Creative Commons license, which you can find here. This license allows you to make changes to the photo, like cropping our putting text over it, as long as you credit the artist.

Obviously the photos themselves are generally very striking. There are a lot of talented photographers on the site. I’m not completely sold on the idea however for a couple of reasons:

• The photos don’t lend themselves as much to our “captions” which I think are sometimes funny.
• Our plug-in that we use for the captions won’t let us credit the photographer in it, so I’m going to have to find a new plug-in
• Most importantly, in another article by skellie on problogger, she was advocating against changing the “style” of your image usage. So I think she would disapprove of me sometimes using stylish flickr photos, and sometimes using silly cartoons. She’s pretty successful so I’m reluctant to ignore her advice, but I’d hate to commit to never using cartoons and such again.

I may have to disregard her advice for the time being and mix pretty flickr photos with the other stock media. I think in many cases they’re a visual draw and more compelling than the art we’ve been using. I just hate to give up my opportunity to try to be pithy. Either way it is definitely something to consider for any blogger.

One difficult component in doing this is it’s hard to find people who are motivated and promising, but not so big that they get no benefit out of working with you. If you just go and search for your keywords, you will basically find the people who have already “made it.” We’re looking for people who are going to “make it,” but are still climbing the ladder.

Enter Google Alerts

With Google Alerts, we can put in search terms and Google will let us know when something new appears for that search. While this will sometimes just show new posts in the “blue chip” sites, very often you will get results in up-and-comers. Quite honestly new blogs tend to post more often than established ones, so we’ve generally found that we get a higher percentage of new than old.

I recommend going ahead and creating a Google account to manage your alerts if you don’t already have one. While you can receive alerts without having an account, they are easier to manage and remember if you have an account from which to manage them. Especially since there are so many uses for Google Alerts. You will eventually have so many it will be nice to have a list you can reference.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Live Search Webmaster Center
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

Number 42 for "strap on"…oh dear.

In a not-surprising turn of events, Google’s is by far the most useful. Although its utility diminishes somewhat when it is “punishing” you. Both Microsoft’s and Yahoo!’s have fewer features and Yahoo!’s even has a 24 hour “pending” period when you join. I have no idea why they can’t just validate you immediately like everyone else; that’s part of the purpose of me putting an otherwise useless file on my server.

Anyway, if you’re not using these I recommend them. They can help you analyze what’s going on with your website, which can be a difficult thing to determine at times. For example, with Google’s tools, you can:

• Check when your site was spidered last
• See what errors the bot encountered on your site
• Find “problem content’ like duplicate titles”
• See what searches you rank best for (VERY useful)
• Determine the most frequent keywords in your site and links to your site

…and of course more. These features can really help identify problems on your site and even, in some cases, strengths. I would definitely put these tools on my “must have” list. Also check out the relevant blogs for the tools:

• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog
• Live Search Blog

I love Google Analytics

In fact I may love it too much. I often spend far too much of my day sitting in front of the screen checking to see if and how our visitation numbers have changed. It’s really quite a waste of time. That being said I feel like anyone running a website should have Google Analytics or some kind of tracking software installed.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free service that allows a webmaster to see who is viewing their website, where they came from and what they are viewing. It also allows you to track things like how people navigate through your site and allows you to define goals and see what factors are contributing to people who satisfy those goals.

Why You Should Install It Now

I recommend putting Google Analytics on your site as soon as possible. I actually intended to write this blog right when I started the site, but…I didn’t. You’re probably thinking that since you will be pretty much the only one going there for a while, there’s no rush. There’s a possibility however that people will just “drop by.” All of our sites have been spidered without us submitting them to Google and before we had an inbound link. When people “wander in” by certain search terms you get a feel for what you should be focusing your content on.

Installing Google Analytics also helps you quickly come to the realization that you need some kind of Content Management System (CMS), even if it’s a DIY one. In the course of developing your site you will have all kinds of site-wide changes like adding analytics that you will need to do, and some kind of content management is a must to make that simple. Even if it’s just using Smarty templates, you need to make these kind of changes easy.

Quick Tips

A couple of quick tips that would have saved me some time:

Use a Cookie to Exclude Yourself

You want to exclude yourself and anyone who works on your site from inflating your stats. You can do this with a filter as described here. Most people tend to exclude themselves by IP address. I may be unique, but I travel a lot and use my laptop from many different locations. I also have semi-frequent changes in IP due to my ISP, so IP seems like a fairly inexact way to exclude myself. If I set a cookie on my browser, then I know that I will be excluded regardless of where I log in from.

Important: You need to do this on every browser on your machine as it is set via cookie. If you rune IE and Firefox both for example, both need to have the cookie set.

The “Referrer” To Your Site Sticks

I found the documentation on this subject to be unclear but finally found confirmation here. If someone comes to you from a certain link or search and then returns to your site directly in the future, it will still show as being “referred” from the original site. This makes sense as it helps you calculate how “useful” that source was.

Read the Google Analytics Blog

The Google Analytics Blog oftentimes has great insight and information. I recommend reading the archived content as soon as possible and then keeping up with new posts.

You’ve heard us talk about our link-building frustrations and about how tempting it is to bring in loads of traffic through temporary links. But we continue to put our collective nose to the grindstone, because, as Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall at SEOBook say in the archived 2006 gem,101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website, links “for the forseeable future [are] going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.”

Yes, things have changed since 2006. But we haven’t seen anything out there that discourages solid link-building as one of the best ways to establish a site on the web. As long as that’s the case, we’re going to put some of that grindstone energy behind few of these ideas—the ones we deem to be particularly timeless—and show take you through our trial and error. Stay tuned as we explore specific experiments in implementing many of these 101 tips.

Issues

We thought this was exactly the kind of handy tip that would make “The Four Hour Workweek” worth the money. We feared however that it wouldn’t be useful for us unless we were confident that the mail would actually get there. So to test it, we tried a variety of variations on the address to answer the following questions:

1. Does it matter what addressee you put on the name line?
2. Will it arrive if you use the post office’s address instead of your PO box address?
3. Can you use strange variations of the box # to make your address look more legit?

Addressee

Things work a little differently in Tim Ferriss' world.

We would like to use our PO box for all of our businesses. We don’t really plan on getting that much mail, so the investment of a PO box for each business is going to eat into the small profits of each of these ventures. At the same time, we don’t know what all of those ventures will be right now, but we do know we need a PO box. So we basically just registered the PO box in the name “Protoscopic,” wanting to see if we could address mail to other businesses at the same address and have it arrive intact.

The post office seemed pretty explicit about needing all the names of recipients, so we were a little nervous; at the same time we were fairly confident that the postmen would rather just deliver it than return it over a name thing. So to test this, many of our variations included Walt Disney World For Grownups as the addressee instead of Protoscopic.

Post Office Address

Tim Ferriss’ method is predicated on the idea that your mail will arrive if you use the post office’s address instead of just the zip for your PO Box. This test was pivotal and much less of a foregone conclusion, so we used this in the majority of our variations. If this part didn’t work, the rest was irrelevant.

Box Number Variations

The first hiccup in this plan came when we were assigned our PO box number. It was six digits long, which doesn’t look like a realistic suite address at all. Our only solution to this was to try weird variations like “Suite 19-2548” or “Floor 19, Suite 2548”. We were far from confident this technique would work. The idea of putting “#192548” was not a complete deal-breaker though. It still looked slightly more “suite-like” than a PO box.

Results

Our results were disappointing to say the least:

• Mail addressed to the post office’s address with the PO box included arrived, but with the address struck through and “Bad Address” written on them.
• Mail addressed to the post office’s address with any type of “Suite” or “#” instead of the PO box did not arrive at all.
• At least the matter of the name seemed irrelevant. All our mail address to Walt Disney World For Grownups arrived as long as it used the correct PO box info.

Given this, it seems that it is quite unrealistic for us to use this method. While our sample space was fairly small (two different source locations and 5 letters each time), anything less than a 100% success rate is unacceptable. We were originally concerned that even if we met with success, we would have to keep testing to make sure everything was getting to us; but since the technique doesn’t seem to work for us at all, we don’t have to keep trying.

It may be that in smaller post offices or in other locales this technique will work, but for us it is not acceptable. Fortunately we don’t have a huge need for a realistic business address for any ventures in the near future. If however you were drop-shipping or engaged in some other type of very customer-centric business, this could be a considerable hold-up. A “Virtual Office” may provide a solution for this kind of problem, but is considerably more expensive. In the future we will look for cost effective alternatives, but for now we are just going with the PO Box.