v March 2011 ~ WebsiteSupport

March 19, 2011

Yahoo Pipes: The coolest things on web

By James Maguire

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive tool that enables you to combine many data feeds, like RSS, into a single aggregate. Pipes offers an intuitive visual programming field that lets you filter, remix, and mash-up these feeds to your heart’s content.
You can create Pipes for many purposes. Probably the most common is combining all your favorite news feeds, but that’s just the beginning. One user created a feed that sends him all the apartment listings near parks or schools. Another built a Pipe that sends him all eBay listings within a certain price range.
Oddly, Yahoo launched this wonderful service – which was so popular it crashed the servers its first day – without posting a user’s guide. (Pipes is the product of the programmer-geeks, not the business types.) They say the tutorial is on the way.
In the mean time, here’s the quick guide to building your own Pipe. Note: this guide keeps it simple, but don’t be limited. Once you’ve built a basic Pipe, you can mix and remix until you’ve created the ultimate mash-up. Let’s get started.
Choose Your Sources
1) Go to Yahoo Pipes and click on MyPipes. Since you haven’t made one yet, clicking on MyPipes takes you to an editing page to create your first one.

2) The “Editing Pipe” page gives you an intuitive visual interface. This is a where you’ll specify all the feeds you want to use, and combine and filter them as you wish. On the left-side menu bar, under “Sources,” is a box called “Fetch.” Drag this box onto the editing field. You’ll see an URL box: 

3) Enter the URL of the RSS feed you want. (You can find the URL of a site’s RSS feed by clicking on the RSS icon in the URL box at any Web site with a feed.) I get my tech news from Internetnews, so I added its RSS feed first. You can also find feeds using the “Search for Pipes and Feeds” box in the upper right corner. Notice that when you add a feed, the Debugger in the lower right corner is updated.

4) Once you have your first RSS entered, you’ll want to add a few more (most likely several more). The point of Yahoo Pipes is to combine many information sources into one. So pull another Fetch box on to the editing field to add more URLs of RSS feeds. You can also add more URLs by clicking the “+” sign next to URL in the Fetch box. 


5) Drag a Union box onto the editing field. (You’ll find the Union box under the "Operators" category on the left-side tools menu.) Connect the outputs of both your Fetch boxes to the inputs of the Union box by clicking and dragging your mouse from point to point.
Filtering Your Pipe
At this point our Pipe has four feeds, all with a hefty array of daily headlines. That’s a lot of information to wade through every day. So let’s filter our Pipe to limit the data flow down to a manageable level. 

6) To do this, drag a Filter box onto the editing field. (You’ll find the Filter box under the Operators category on the left-side menu bar.) Connect the output of the Union box to the input of the Filter box. Connect the output of the Filter box with the input of the Pipe Output. (Notice that the choices in the “title” drop-down menu on the Filter box update when you make this connection.) 

The Filter box allows you to filter your content in a zillion different ways – click on the “title” and “contains” boxes to see the many possibilities. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, you’re not interested in reading articles about outsourcing or wireless. The example in the picture shows how to block any feeds that concern these topics. 

Save Your Pipe
7) Now, click on Save near the top of the editing field, and name your Pipe. On the MyPipes page, you can click Publish to make your Pipe public.
Click on Run this Pipe to see the aggregated feed you’ve created. (Will you really be able to consume this much information? If not, go back and filter out more content.)
Having connected your feeds together into an aggregate, filtered them as you see fit, and hit Save, you’ve built your first Pipe. Congratulations!

March 13, 2011

Install: LAMP web server and Drupal 7 in Ubuntu

Installing a web server is very easy in Ubuntu (I use ubuntu10.10), just enter a few lines in the terminal: There is no need to install and configure each part of a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) installation individually. You can also install other programs this way. The downside is that all components are installed automatically, and not reviewed by you. But as long as you only use the web server locally (localhost or 127.0.0.1), and don't open up for access from the Internet, it should be safe.

Installing LAMP web Server

To install a LAMP web server, enter this command in a terminal and enter your password:
sudo tasksel install lamp-server

After a while the installation process will prompt you for a password for the MySQL server. Make sure that the CAPS Lock button is not activated! If all goes well, the installation will return to the terminal, and the web server is installed. Test this by going to your browser and enter http://localhost/ in the address bar. If the installation was successful, you will see an "It works!" message.


Update php.ini - allow big files, avoid memory issues

To allow importing large sql dumps through phpmyadmin, and avoiding time outs during demanding requests, it is also necessary to update the php.ini file of the Apache server. To open up the php.ini in gedit, enter this in your terminal:

gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

...and update the values five places, where it says:

max_execution_time = 120
max_input_time = 90
memory_limit = 96M
post_max_size = 150M
upload_max_filesize = 150M
session.gc_maxlifetime = 14400


Fix Apache Error "Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName"

Open the httpd.conf file:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

The httpd.conf file is blank, so add the following to the file, and then save it:

ServerName localhost
Create a MySQL database

To create a database in the MySQL database, log in to the MySQL shell:

mysql -u root -p

Create a database, for a Drupal installation in this example, type in the MySQL shell:

CREATE DATABASE drupal7;

and leave the shell:

quit

If you typed in the password(in this example, "ROOT") accidentally with caps lock on, this is how you change it to something safer. "root" is NOT recommended as password. From the terminal:

mysqladmin -u root -p'ROOT' password 'yournewpassword'
Install phpmyadmin

You can also create and administer your MySQL databases through phpmyadmin:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Administer your databases at http://localhost/phpmyadmin/
Install and enable mod_rewrite

Install mod_rewrite, to get nice URL's:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Enable mod_rewrite:

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

...and change "AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride All", around line 11:


Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All

Restart the Apache web server:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Installing Drupal 7
1. Start nautilus up with this command:

gksudo nautilus

...and navigate to the /var folder, right-click on the www folder, click 'Permissions' and set owner and group to your own user name. This will prevent problems with automatically created folders in the future.

2. Download and extract Drupal 7 from http://drupal.org/. Rename the folder to drupal7 and move it to /var/www/ where the web sites of the Apache web server reside. Result: /var/www/drupal7

3. Create the files folder, like this: /var/www/drupal7/sites/default/files. Right-click the 'files' folder, select 'Properties' -> 'Permissions' and under 'Others', set 'Folder Access' to 'Create and delete files'

4. Make a copy of the default.settings.php file in /var/www/drupal7/sites/default and rename it to settings.php. Right-click settings.php, select 'Properties' -> 'Permissions' and under 'Others', set 'Folder Access' to 'Create and delete files'

NOTE: Add an exception in Firefox, if you have disabled "Accept cookies from sites" and unblock the new site if you have a script blocker activated in your browser.

If all went well, you should now be able to enter http://localhost/drupal7 and install Drupal.

Setting up a virtual host


To set up a virtual host, allowing you to enter just http://drupal7/ in stead of http://localhost/drupal7/:

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

...and add:

127.0.0.1 drupal7

To define where the Apache web server should be looking for the files:

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

...and add:


DocumentRoot /var/www/drupal7
ServerName drupal7


As always, when you change the set up of the Apache server, restart it:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Move apache webroot from /var/www to your /home directory and move MySQL folder

For back up reasons and to have a more "normal" work flow when adding files to your web site, you can move the apache webroot from /var/www to /home/USERNAME/.www -- the .www folder will be hidden until you press Ctrl+H to unhide it:

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Change DocumentRoot /var/www to DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/.www

If you have set up a virtual host:

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

...and change to: DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/.www
From http://gullele.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/changing-default-apache-webroot-in-ubuntu/

Likewise, to move MySQL from /var/lib/mysql to /home/USERNAME/.mysql follow this guide: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=897354
 
Install Drush

With Drush you can install modules and update Drupal from the command-line: http://drupal.org/project/drush

wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-6.x-3.3.tar.gz
tar xvzf drush-6.x-3.3.tar.gz
sudo chmod 555 drush/drush
sudo chown -R root:root drush
sudo mv drush /usr/local/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/drush/drush /usr/local/bin/drush
sudo drush dl drush_make

If you get an "exec: 53: php: not found" error after running the last line ("sudo drush dl drush_make") you might have to install the PHP command line interface, with

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

Great work !! If there is any problem then do post the problems below. I will try to answer your problem.

March 12, 2011

Drupal 7: Basic Theming with Zen and CSS

This screencast gives an introduction to creating a subtheme of Zen and modifying it with CSS.


Thanks to  for the video.     

Drupal's "easy button" for better keyword research


Auther:  Colin Alsheimer

Keyword research, one of the most essential facts of good search engine optimization can also be one of the easiest tasks to do wrong. Here are five ways you can improve the effectiveness of your keyword research. Then, I'll show you Drupal's "easy button" for better keyword research.

1. Analyze your content for keyword ideas
One of the primary objectives for the search engines is to serve the most relevant content for a particular users query. Search engines determine what web content is about through a variety of factors (this is what we spend time optimizing in SEO), some of these factors include your meta page titles, keyword usage within your page copy, and backlinks to your website. So it would make sense that you would want to begin your keyword research by first figuring out what keywords and concepts are already prevalent on your webpage.

You can do this in two ways. You could go through your content by hand, and pick out what you believe to be the most relevant or most used keywords on the page. Or, you can put it in the hands of web software that can make this analysis for you. In Drupal, both the Alchemy module and Scribe SEO module can help you with this analysis. Alternatively, you can try the Scribe SEO module demo, and input your own content to analyze.

Once you find your keyword ideas, plug them into a keyword research tool like Wordtracker to get more related keywords.

2. Start broad
When you're first starting keyword research, you always want to begin with broad (root) keywords, then work your way to long tail variations. For example, if your website is an e-commerce retailer for custom bicycle seats, you may want to start your keyword research with phrases like "bike", "bicycle", or "bike seats".

3. Use long tail modifiers
As you do your keyword research, you'll start to see variations of your primary (root) keyword pop up. For example, your search for the phrase "bicycle" might return results for "used bicycle for sale" or "buy bicycles online". "Used", "for sale", "buy", and "online" would all be considered modifier keywords, and the entire phrase (used bicycle for sale) is what we would consider a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword by itself provides less traffic then your root keywords (bicycle), but in aggregate, there are many more relevant long tail searches then there are for your root keywords. Long tail keywords tend to bring more qualified traffic, convert at higher rates, and are less competitive.

4. Look at your competitors for inspiration
Use your competitors as a guide for your keyword research efforts. Look at their meta page title tags, headers, and page copy to see what they may be trying to optimize for. Sometimes this can even lead to inspiration for a new niche market to go after.

5. Look for uncompetitive niches
One of the biggest mistakes people make in keyword research is assuming it's about finding the words with the most possible searches. Really, good keyword research is about finding those keywords that not only get a large volume of searches, but are also uncompetitive, and deliver qualified traffic. I frequently tell clients that I'd rather they get 500 qualified visitors per month who convert, then 5,000 who don't.

6. Localize your keywords where possible
One of the easiest ways to long tail your target keywords is to add local modifiers to them. For example, instead of optimizing just for the phrase "website design company", we can add the "Dallas" to the phrase, making "website design company dallas", and be optimized for local searches as well.

The Drupal Easy Button!
As promised, here's the easy button for keyword research in your Drupal website. Our Keyword Research module will help you easily perform keyword research right within the page you're trying to optimize. Be sure to combine it with the other modules found in the content analysis suite to unlock the true power of the keyword research module. 

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