Webdesign

The situation: Drupal 7 has a little bit improved graphics installer, so the installation should be relatively easy, similar to the Drupal 6. But Drupal 7 also uses the new PDO dependency to connect to its database tables. And there could be a problem when you would like to install Drupal 7 on HostGator webhosting.

Infolinks, one of the companies providing In Text Advertising Solution I can recommend, this announced lowest payment threshold this week. It is great news for smaller publishers and owner of smaller websites. The $100 USD limit is now $50 only for all publishers using Payoneer and PayPal payments. There is more news.

It is a well known fact that the Excel spreadsheet editor supports CSV files. These files can easily be created using PHP. Since the OpenXML format emerged you can even use PHP to create Excel sheets (files in the XLSX format) directly.

I would like to inform you about a new Czech website built on Drupal Content Management System. This website offer a catalog of masseurs, masseuses and massage studios in Brno (Czech Republic) and its surroundings.

We have launched a new website for all blogger, website owners and advertisers. AdSpaceOffer.com is Drupal powered website using a few third party modules and Acquia Marina theme from TopNotchThemes. Everyone is welcome to post his offer/request for an advertising or ad space. People could earn some points and we are planning some bonus system for this points.

As Drupal 6 is the reality for a few months already and its main contributed modules are ready for the 6 version, I decided to upgrade my main websites to the Drupal 6. Here is my experience. My biggest website is Czech www.maxiorel.cz with its 2000 visitors per day. It has an English clone running at www.maxiorel.com. As the Maxiorel.com is a smaller, I chose it as the first to migrate. I already migrated some websites like www.anastacia.cz and running some websites (www.backuphowto.info and www.photohowto.info) from their beginning. But the Maxiorel.com should be my first bigger Drupal 6 migration.

The Webdesign section was updated. I have added a bunch of Drupal powered websites I have done during the last year. If you are a Drupal fan, take a look on them. Starting from now I offer Drupal consultancy. My experience is that many people welcome this since the consultancy is much less expensive than complete website creation.

You should also know, that my book about Drupal is now published in its second edition. More info can be found at the publisher website.

We have made some changes to our websites Photo HowTo and Screenshots Archive in the last days. As you probaly know, the Photo HowTo website is intended to amateur photographers and helps them with articles about taking photos, editing photos and with photo software and websites articles. The newest article's type is digital camera reviews. After a few weeks of lower activity, this website is now regularly updated. The latest improvement is in navigation menu. Now you have much simpler access to all article types.

The second website, Screenshots Archive is a large gallery of screenshots in PNG format, without watermarks and available for free to use on your own website or in printed materials or magazines. The Screenshots Archive is now Cooliris/Piclens enabled. It will help to browse the screenshots galleries much easier. Read more about this feature.

Have you ever think what is the value of your website? Yes, the real price may differ. The bigger price is for the owner, the lower is for the potential buyer. But there is a tool that will helps with website value calculation. You can use it to check your competitors too. Moreover this tool will also check the number of backlinks, Alexa rank, PageRank, indexed pages and more.

This weekend I looked for a new webhosting for my two Drupal projects. After stumbling a few forums I decided to try HostGator webhosting and its Baby package. I have to say that I was impressed by the professional look of their services and their customer support. Setting up a new webhosting was a question of a few minutes. After it was done I started moving my websites.

Website owners using Drupal have a very detailed log of access available directly in their admin pages. However there is no built-in functionality which could show how many RSS subscribers does the website have. You have all the neccessary information available in the log. So only thing you have to do is to find them and to show them. I will show you how to prepare a block that will inform you and your readers about current RSS subscribers count.

Everyone interested in CMS Drupal has own list of favorites RSS sources related to Drupal. There is a mother of sources – Drupal.org. I am sure that you know the main RSS source on this website. But I think that many of you search for regular information about new module releases, new modules build, information for developers or Drupal theme creators. I prepared the list of useful English Drupal sources and here is it:

Website creators often fight with older versions of Internet Explorer. This browser before version 7 doesn’t support transparent PNG images. Using PNG pictures with the transparency has certain foundation. GIF that the Internet Explorer 6 support without problems works with maximum of 256 colours and transparency in this format is impossible confront with alpha channel transparency in PNG images. Fortunately it is possible Internet Explorer 6 and 5.5 relatively easily make to respect the entire advantage of PNG format included its transparency.

Do you know how much is your domain name worth? There are a few sites with automatic domain name appraisals and other useful tools. It’s good to know what your domain worth is. But note that any automatic calculation is very inaccurate. So don’t worry if you get different prices on different domain name appraisals sites. OK, there are URLs for the calculation sites:

Search engines and their crawlers/bots automatically and periodically checks your site. The more your site is updated, the more it is checked by the crawlers. You need the backlinks to your site too. But what can you to do if you started with totally new website without backlinks? How could the crawlers find your site? There is a simple answer. Submit your site to the most known search engines manually.