Jennifer's blog

This is a fun bit of information about creating unique meta titles in Drupal. Meta titles is something I had never fully grasped until earlier today when Drupal SEO tips became a main topic of conversation with friend and co-worker, Neil Lemons.

Having unique meta titles is arguably the best SEO technique you can leverage. It's the search engines first impression of the page - defining what the page is about.

The meta title is crawled by search engines first because it's at the top of in your HTML source code, usually below HEAD tag and before BODY tag. Meta title elements must appear in the HEAD section of every HTML document.

Why would your title tag be different than the title of your post?

Currently I am developing out the user interface for an online community. Before getting started, I spent a lot of time on some of the most popular (and some not so popular) social community websites, and created a list of basic elements to include when developing out user profiles.

1. Have a clear purpose.

• When you're developing out a community website make sure you have a clear purpose for what you are doing. Write down the purpose of this community and what steps you are going to take to accomplish it.

This morning kicked off the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California. Thousands of developers and press waited in line for the highly anticipated keynote by Phil Schiller.

Twitter was being flooded by attendees giving minute by minute updates using the hash tag #WWDC. At 12pm CST today, there were 78 new tweets per second with the WWDC hash tag attached. There was a lot of momentum and energy surrounding this morning's event -- people were predicting what was going to be announced, a new iPhone or OS, and rumors started to spread that someone saw Steve Jobs in the building, spawning the prediction that Jobs would make an appearance. When it came down to it, everyone just wanted to hear it from the man himself.

Written by: Jennifer Conley and Colin Alsheimer

1. Set up and decorate your house



When you move into a new neighborhood, what’s the first thing you do? You make your space your own. A new coat of paint, photos, some hip furniture from the local consignment shop...you add things that make the space reflect you. Treat a new social network profile like your new house or apartment.

• Use your full name and upload a picture of yourself, letting people know immediately that you’re a real person and not a spammer.
• Fill in a complete profile. Give the impression that you took the time to complete your profile.
• Customize and personalize your profile. Upload a background image, change the color settings, setup and arrange custom block areas. Your personality should come out a little on your profile. Don’t leave the default profile settings.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes in 3 easy steps:

• Go to the Advanced menu in iTunes
• Click Subscribe to Podcast
• Copy and paste the following URL and click OK: http://www.leveltendesign.com/podcasts/_feed

Voilà! You are now subscribed to LevelTen's weekly podcast using the iTunes application.

If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please contact us with a proposal topic.

Displaying events on your webpage can be tricky because there are so many different modules or plugins you can use depending on your CMS. Google has made it easy for anyone to display events by providing an embeddable calendar for those with a Google Calendar. The calendar is clean in design and is easy to customize to fit your webpage/style.

The Drupal Association recently announced DrupalCon will be in Paris from September 1st to September 5th, 2009. Oui oui! DrupalCon Paris 2009 will be at Maison Internationale de Paris. Speakers, sessions, and ticket information have not yet been released, but follow DrupalCon Paris on Twitter and visit their website to find up-to-the-minute information.

In search for the perfect theme, I have been to the end and back. And here's what I learned: There is no such thing as the perfect theme. Your taste will change, your needs will fluctuate over time, and eventually you will want another theme. What's great about free themes is how easy it is to download, upload and activate. That's it. It's 3 steps. And they are free. My recommendation will be to start with a free theme, build out your site, and then buy a theme. You will be less likely to change out your theme when shelling out $300 a pop, and the process will help to identify what elements and features you want available in the theme. Well, let's get to it: 10 Free Drupal Themes on the Web (in no order)

**Funny fact: The reason why most Drupal themes begin with "A" is because Drupal.org defaults and display's themes by their Title, beginning with A.

MAGAZEEN

"The Magazeen theme is a cool and modern theme with a stylish colour scheme. This bold magazine 2-col-theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, grids and magazine-look. It was created especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers."

http://drupal.org/project/magazeen

I would never want there to be a day when I didn't learn something new. I thrive off new ideas. New blog posts. New directions. And right now, it's everything new in Drupal.

(I should clarify something here: New to me, may not be new to you.)

On Monday evening, the team was here late finishing out our second Sprint Planning Meeting. Around 8pm, our Developer, Dustin Currie, mentioned that one of our recent projects was not setup for users to subscribe to the blog and articles RSS feed. We were two days from launching this project, and I was perplexed that this was being brought up right then, because everyone at LevelTen understands the importance of an RSS feed. And we were about to launch a site that didn't have it setup! I said, "Show me. Show me how to set it up so that it doesn't get overlooked the next time!" Like I said, I love learning new things. Perhaps you do, too, and will have use for this on your current/past/or future projects.

After I think there is one last business card at the bottom of my giant bag, I'll rummage through my contents and then say, "Oh, I thought I had one, but I don't." It's embarrassing, and it's a missed opportunity. Business cards are also somewhat of a cliche, and they can be difficult to manage over the years.

Last week, I came across contxts - it's a mobile sms service that you use to text your business card to people on-the-spot.