CustomerCentrix

Interesting series called Zero Cash, A Little Talent and 30 Days by Jennifer Laycock, who writes for Search Engine Guide. It is a practical story about making money on the internet.

Links to the articles are available here.

How to build a custom version of Drupal? We have been implementing Drupal for customers and ourselves, and each time make some of the same module and theme additions and settings changes. Today, we are making a first try at a customized version (starting with Drupal 4.6.3) called Site Centrix.

The initial target for this customization is small customer sites or internal sites used for advertising with AdSense or affiliates.

Search and Replace "Drupal" with "SiteCentrix" in all files. Match case and use whole word to avoid changing code.

Replace the default /favicon.ico with the SpreadFireFox theme version.

For some upcoming new improvements to LearnCentrix, I have been analyzing javascript widgets and tools. I am always interested in new technology, currently such things as AJAX, JSON and the newest techniques for CSS and DHTML. The specific issues that we need to resolve in the next few months are:

Asynchronous loading of an html/javascript tree - we currently use a tree component to load a course, which is like an outline of web pages and other learning objects. This tree typically contains a couple hundred items, but occasionally it has 300-500 or more We are expanding on how this works, so it must accommodate potentially many thousands of items. Since the response time is currently pretty slow on the initial load when you get above 300 or so items, we need to move to a model where only the nodes closest to the root are loaded initially and the rest are loaded as needed (when requested by the user).

We have turned on ads from both of these, but are still very much novices in this area. Currently, I have set a budget of $5/day each with a max cost per click of 25 cents. We purchased the initial set-up from Yahoo, so we have a set of ads that they created for us based on our, now outdated, product pages. I had thought that I would just copy those ads to AdWords and do some editing in the process. Unfortunately, there is too much difference between the size of ads (number of text characters) and the creation process to make this easy. So, I am slowly just trying to create some new AdWords campaigns and groups.

For both this site and LearnCentrix, we have made a few changes to gear up for more exposure and better availability. We have turned on caching. We are now monitoring both sites and getting occasional timeout alerts for a requests that exceed 10 seconds. This will hopefully eliminate these alerts.

Perhaps more important is installing the google sitemap module for Drupal. This is now on and available either here or on the LearnCentrix site. You need a gmail account to submit sitemaps. More information is available on Google's site.

Here are some good reference materials for WordPress. This is the software that I am using for our Campbell family website.

This tool is a nice idea. You fill out a form with colors, metadata and such and it cranks out a nice looking theme complete with images. A couple of complaints at first glance are that the html is table driven and somewhat complicated and the results don't work quite right in FireFox. Of course, the table layout is fairly common, and part of the idea is that you don't need to mess with the underlying html.

The other problem which is more a user/usability issue is that you have to be able to select a combination of colors that works well together.

Here is an article from Manageability titled 101 Ways to Make Money off Open Source. There aren't actually 101 items listed yet, but still there are some good ideas.

Some good information is available at ajaxpatterns.org.

Here is a nice example of a Drupal site along with some reference materials.

It is a mishmash of personal, technical, politics and such from the author, but is well organized and puts to good use the features of Drupal.

His current site theme was created by Creative Bits who also has some reference materials that are more along the lines of web design.