Health

Domain names are the real estate of the Internet age, and you may not realize it but quite a few people have become multi-millionaires buying and selling domain names. They are often called Domainers but I prefer the title Domain Investor. I am a Domain Investor myself, and have bought and sold premium domains. What surprises me is that Domain Investors will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a domain name, but then launch a very basic site that cost less than $500 to build, including content writing, design, and everything.

Open Source, a phrase that many years made IT Managers cringe at the thought of fighting unsupported and poorly developed code. True, there are ton's of those types of applications still out there; however, Drupal has really made a strong effort to erase that mentality with an ever maturing core code base. In addition, more and more developers are creating and submitting modules to provide advanced functionality at a pace which licensed platforms simply can't keep up.

Besides the obvious possibilities for a Drupal boom in 2010 (launch of Drupal 7), there are several other reasons that may spark an increase in popularity.

Government Interest

The fact that whitehouse.gov launched on Drupal was huge news in 2009, but with the recently published "Open Government Directive," the whitehouse site may be just the tip of the iceberg for Drupal.

This year has turned out to be quite a year for Drupal. Landmark websites were launched, great educational resources were made available in both book and online instructional format, and awards were won. With the release of Drupal 7 just around the corner, now is a good time to look back at the Drupal highlights of 2009.

Recapping the top blog posts for October 2009, grouped by author and total pageviews:

Colin Alsheimer

Total views: 1094

• SEO Is More Than Good Design: A Rebuttal To Derek Powazek
• LevelTen Named "Top SEO Web Design Company Website"
• Vote For LevelTen's iSite Essentials!
• Whitehouse.gov Goes Drupal [Drupal News]

If you missed the big news this weekend, WhiteHouse.gov has officially made the switch to using open source platform, Drupal as its content management system over the proprietary CMS platform that was in use before.

According to a great blog post by Nancy Scola at TechPresident:

This week's Speak Easy Drupal is all about social communities. If you've been around Drupal for very long, you know that a lot of Drupal's power and appeal lies in it's ability to easily create next generation, web 2.0 community based websites. In this episode, we go over the best modules to test for your community website, propper ettiquite for any social community, and examples of top Drupal community websites.

Our panelists this week include:

• Rachel Scott

Drupal, and its contributed social modules, is the perfect system to create a powerful, feature-rich, online social community or networking website, while limiting development expenses and time to get up and running. Here are the best Drupal modules, default and contributed, for social networking that LevelTen has utilized on our community websites:

E-mail marketing is one of those tools that's easy to do, but really hard to do well. There are scores of great articles and research about E-mail marketing best practices online, but use these 5 quick tips as a starting point for successful e-mail campaigns.

1. Tease Your Audience

If your e-mail is about promoting new site content, tease your readers! Simply provide the article/blog title with a teaser description, then link it out to the main site page.

I just finished watching James Walker's "Why I Hate Drupal" presentation on the flight back from DrupalCon DC. The presentation was a perfect exclamation point to the clarity I received about Drupal this week.