Be Circle: Freelance Drupal expertise. Playing full contact Drupal in Toronto.

Be Circle Podcast: Facebook, Widgets, iFrames and IE Pain.

In today's blog post I try something completely different: a podcast. To listen, just click on the player above.
Today I talk about

• Facebook cookies.
• P3P policies and the P3P policy hack
<?php header('P3P: CP="HONK"'); ?>

• Internet Explorer pain (what else is new). Specifically iFrames. Example after the jump

Review: Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization

At one point in my career my employer repositioned his web application development company to become a search engine optimization (SEO) company. This repositioning meant that for a very brief period I actually worked in the world of SEO. I didn't much care for it (hence the 'very brief period' working in SEO). For all the science of keyword research and result monitoring, there seemed to be an equal part of voodoo or tea leaf reading. And, lets face it, SEO wasn't as glamourous as finding an elegant technical solution or designing something beautiful for a client website.

Still, every so often SEO of a site is a client requirement. Even if you ultimately outsource the work of optimization to a third party, if you are a web site developer you need to be knowledgeable about SEO and be prepared to build your site in such a way as to ease the work of optimization. But, with so much information available on the web on the topic of SEO, even approaching the topic somewhat overwhelming.

Luckily there are books like Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization by Ben Finklea to help you get oriented. Not only is this book filled with valuable information about SEO, keyword research and optimization practices, it does a good job of highlighting all the Drupal specific features, tools and modules available to you. It also includes plenty of step by step instructions to help implement your SEO strategy using the tools available in Drupal.

Score based on my own arbitrary rating system:
For any Drupal Developer or Drupal Site Administrator: 4.5/ 5

Ontario [GNU] Linux Fest 2009 and Toronto Open Source Week

On October 24th 2009 Ontario [GNU] Linux Fest comes to Toronto again, and registration ($40 advance) for the event is now open.

So how is this showing up on Drupal planet? Well, Richard Weait (Linux fest organizer) and Linux Fest have been generous sponsors of Drupalcamp Toronto for the past couple of years and I thought the Drupal community might like to support the Linux fest as well. Besides that, no fewer than 2 Drupal rockstars will be be presenting at Linux Fest:
Emma Jane Hogbin (Front End Drupal) will be speaking about Writing Effective Self-Help Guides for World Domination
and
Khalid Baheyeldin (Drupal performance expert and Drupal security guru team member) will present on Introducing the LAMP Stack

Review: Front End Drupal

I finally had a chance to fully review Front End Drupal by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Kafer after a long period of waiting. I say "long period" because I first heard details of the book last August at Drupalcon is Szeged when talking with Emma Jane at a Birds of a Feather session. More recently I had to finish work on a project and another book review delaying my review by another two weeks.

I built my first 'web page' about 15 years ago. Since then I graduated to building 'web sites' and then custom 'web applications'. Over that time I worked with several content management systems, a handful of web languages, and worked with clients of all shapes and sizes. I've worked at all levels of the web stack from graphic design to information architecture; from web server configuration to database administration; from HTML to server side scripting. In short I've worked on everything from the back end to the front end.

While Front End Drupal is obviously about working with the 'font end' Drupal, I was immediately impressed by the first chapter of the book which provide valuable tips for any web designer or web project manager or developer. It was apparent right from the start that this book was written by web development veterans since recommendations they give early on could only come from those that wear battle scars. As you progress through the book it is also clear the authors are intimately familiar with Drupal from both theoretical and practical standpoints.

Score based on my own arbitrary rating system:
For Drupal Novices: 4.5/ 5
For Experienced Drupal Administrators: 4.5 / 5

Drupal Wins in CNET Webware 100 again (again)

I think we can start to see a pattern emerging here. Drupal gets nominated for a Webware 100 award and goes on to win yet again in 2009.

I won't go on at length about this, but its worth mentioning that Drupal's peers in the award category included Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The majority of people out there still don't use Drupal and Facebook in the same sentence, but with more wins like this it won't be long until Drupal is universally recognized.

Congrats to all the hard work of core and contributed module maintainers and all the documentation writers and all the admins, bloggers and general supporters that make Drupal so great.