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

Not that long ago I was writing about how much I liked twitter.  It seems that as a fairly late adopter, I missed most of the glory days and it is now on the typical community life cycle:

Given that Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model, they may want to hurry up and accept that $230 million dollar price tag that’s being thrown around.  To me the biggest sign that it’s over the hill is the mad “popularity contest” component of it.  Your goal in Twitter now is apparently to be followed by as many people as possible, regardless of who they are.  There are techniques for finding more people who will “auto follow” you.  This leaves me with one big question:

Why Do I Want Someone Who Has No Interest In Me To Follow Me?

If that person isn’t ever going to be interested in, and probably won’t even read, my tweets, then why am I happy they’re following me?  At this point I feel somewhat silly that I persued a “quality over quantity” approach to my Twitter friends.  What the popularity contest tells me however, is that most people are not really reading anything that’s being Tweeted.  As people read less and less, the service becomes less valuable.

Soon enough, someone else will come up with some other new cool community and the early adopters will go have some fun there until it gets lame and they have to move on again.  Hopefully, next time I can be at the front end, instead of the back.  Anyone know what that next thing will be?

I’ve written before about my love/hate relationship with Drupal.  It has always seemed like if I just learn one more thing I will suddenly have complete mastery and be able to create fantastic sites with minimal effort.  I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of help and the lack of intuitiveness in the application itself and in its community, and I’ve always been convinced that it is a result of perverse incentives.

Right now, Drupal is a great and interesting piece of software that is free.  All the people who work in the community to expand and support it basically get bupkis for their time.  In fact, it is my (completely unresearched) opinion that most of them make their money through Drupal consulting.  The obvious power of Drupal convinces some hapless soul to use it and then they find out they are over their head and call in the cavalry.

Obviously you can see how the incentives here are bad.  If I’m a Drupal contributor, I want my software to be powerful, but I actually want it to be hard to use. Now if you ask me, I doubt very much that any of them think of it in those terms and are actually really awesome people who contribute their time to make a really cool product.  However, I think that their incentives are such that they’re going to be motivated to do some things and not others.

I’ve repeatedly considered making an external wiki, not subject to the peevishness of the Drupal forums.  Where people don’t like to tell you why you shouldn’t want to do what you want to do and just help you do it.  However I’ve noticed a horrifying transformation coming over myself.  As I slowly learn how to do things in Drupal, I don’t want to share.

I think to myself, “If I can patch X, Y and Z together it will make an awesome site and it won’t be hard at all.”  But I’m suddenly overcome with a desire to keep that information to myself in order to maximize it’s benefit for me.  I mean, I’ve struggled forever to gain mastery over this evil program, why should I share the fruits of my labor.  If I share how easy it was to make my super-cool site, everyone will do it…terrifying.  I think the Drupal is taking over…

Photo by: nevet5

We were discussing the other day about future ventures and Annie basically put forth the contention that “forums were dead.” She said they seemed “archaic” and she didn’t know why anyone would bother making a free standing forum, when they could just make one on Facebook. This was troubling to me for a few reasons:

I Know Diddly About Facebook

One of the first things that troubled me about the whole thing is that I know nothing about Facebook. She is clearly the Facebook master in the organization. I’ve never even bothered to give it the rudimentary attention that I’ve given MySpace (which is next to none). I have no real reason to justify why I’ve been ignoring a huge social change in the area I’m hoping to build businesses in, but there you have it. I’m ignorant. That was the first troubling bit.

She Seemed Right

At first blush, the second troubling fact was that I could totally see her point. We’re out there trying to build communities, when Facebook is basically making all the same tools available to people who aren’t savvy. As Annie puts it, “Grandma won’t join a forum, but Grandma will get on Facebook.” There’s also all the advantages that come from the components being integrated so well. I can go to one control panel and see information about my whole online world. That’s very compelling.

Why Facebook is like Socialism

Finally I hit on why I think Facebook is not destined to take over the Web. It comes down to two things: Efficiency and Innovation.

Facebook is like a centrally planned economy. It’s clean and sanitized and easy to use. It sounds great in theory. Big brains in the sky make the decisions about what tools you need, how you’ll get them and how they’ll be delivered. The bad guys don’t get in and everything is great. In theory that all sounds great.

But just like Socialism, Facebook discourages efficiency. Why? Because no one really has much of a profit motive. They don’t really own their content there. It’s just as hard to compete with someone else’s forum there, but you don’t get any big prize when you win. In the early days that’s not a big problem as you see who the best early adopters are. But once you’re established, it’s really hard to displace the leaders, no matter how fat and lazy they’ve become. Moreover, there’s much less incentive to do so.

Also, Socialism and Facebook inherently deter innovation. On Facebook there’s a simple, “master planned” list of things I can and cannot do. All the innovation has to come from the big brain in the sky. While that helps have a orderly, sterile, nonthreatening environment, it’s bad for innovation. If only Facebook can think of things to do with Facebook, then they will always be trailing in the feature wars.

Thus it seems likely to me that while Facebook can get off to a start with “good” planning. Ultimately they will eventually make mistakes and as long as you are the only one making decisions, you will be the one penalized by your mistakes. I ultimately don’t think there can ever be a “super app” that replaces the Internet as a whole, for those two simple reasons: Efficiency and Innovation.

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.

The post that we were the most excited about was <a href=”http://www.protoscopic.com/articles/tim-ferriss-po-box-solution”>Tim Ferriss’ P.O. Box Solution</a> where we actually empirically put his claims to test.  We’ve read in many places about what a great “hack” it is to get a PO Box and use it as a “Suite” to disguise your business address.  It’s a fantastic idea in theory, but certainly failed dismally in our tests.  I was simply thinking today that it’s really interesting that the post we put the most effort into and was the most original wound up being the most popular one as well.

We decided a while back to enter the world of niche sites. We’re basically pursuing a three tiered strategy in the whole Internet Empire plan:

1.) Look for new small opportunities to try out different things.
2.) Continue to promote our existing sites to learn marketing techniques.
3.) Look for the big hit that will take us big time.

Obviously the niche site falls under area one. The theory is that if we can get a relatively successful niche site in various areas, that gives us a viable way to provide “link juice” for any other sites we want to start. There’s also always the chance that anything we discover in that area can be leveraged to apply to area three. So let’s say that we find a tactic that lets us crank out tons of small niche sites at fairly low cost, then that could actually be a valid overall approach. So the general idea is that the worst case scenario is we get another small property out there that doesn’t require any maintenance.

In order to make a quick test a picked a fairly pricey Adsense term, investing and wrote up a small niche site about it. I have some knowledge in the area so it didn’t take long. I also tried to stick to general education and timeless facts, so that the site wouldn’t have to be continually upgraded. The idea here is to stick this out here, promote it briefly and then let it go.

We did some long tail searches and managed to find a fair number of topics for which we could potentially rank and made these the internal pages. For example, “what is the first step to investing?” and “creative real estate investing.” These are hopefully “gettable” terms that will help create an overall investing site that will generate some Adsense revenue.

Problems

The only problem with the site itself is getting its Adsense running. Right now it is a big blank, which I”m hoping is just waiting for the site to be spidered. We’ve had bad luck with waiting around for things to improve when it comes to Google, but I can’t find any other approach other than “wait for it to show up” on the Adsense. The site isn’t in Google’s index yet, so I’m not overly worried. This of course leads to the second problem which is marketing. We’re going to use article marketing, but that comes with it’s own set of hassles, which I’ll discuss next time.

We enjoy a good mystery as much as the next guy, but…

Stumbleupon has always felt more like a feel-good solution than an actual marketing approach. That being said you always have to consider that possibility that if just one person writes a blog about one of your articles it was well worth stumbling it. We have had some interesting results with Stumbleupon so we thought we’d share them with you.

About a month ago we did our first test with Stumbleupon. We had a post in our Walt Disney World for Grownups forums about your most artistic Disney Photos. It has received by far our best results and is an entertaining thread. I stumbled it, Annie stumbled it and one other friend of mine stumbled it over the course of about 12 hours. As a result we got 220 visitors from stumbleupon that day.

Now 220 visitors is an exciting number for us. That far exceeds our usual daily volume by itself. The bounce rate on those visits was 52.27% which was actually much better than I expected. What was a downer was that as far as I was able to determine from the analytics, none of those users ever came back. This was roughly the end result I expected, but it was still somewhat disappointing. On the flip side at least a good influx of people had looked at the post and I thought it was worth trying again.

I didn’t want to annoy people by spamming with lots of posts so I waited until last night to try another attempt. This time we stumbled an article about working remotely from Disney World. I actually thought this article would have a better possibility of “catching on” since this is the kind of thing that sites like Digg go for. I was cautiously optimistic. Once again the three of us stumbled this article, this time within a few seconds of each other and so far, we’ve gotten exactly one visitor. I’m not even sure that visitor wasn’t me, although there seems to be evidence it wasn’t.

Conclusions

About the only explanations I can find for this disparity are:

• This article was submitted to travel instead of photography.
• The other post was submitted over a longer period of time. I find this somewhat unlikely however, because I got about 20 visits just from 1 stumble last time.

Overall I’d say I’m considerably less enthused about stumbling than I was before. I will certainly have to try a few more experiments before I decide for sure though.

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.