I am not looking at the negative sides of things but there are huge productivity cuts due to the FIFA World Cup 2010. During just this one month, the British economy will loose $ 7.36 Billion and United States will loose 121.7 Million in productivity. 3% plan to report sick and stay back home to watch the match, this may not be the case in Nepal.


(Click on image to view Full size - 1000 px wide - Opens in new tab/window)

Source: http://www.insideview.com/productivity-world-cup.html - (opens in new window/tab)

Without doubts, its the biggest sports festival with 80% of the world's population watching the games with an average of 95 million viewers per match. I'm hearing shouts in my neighborhood :).http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

Did you know facebook is now valued at $7.9 - $ 11billion. Your favourite social networking website will earn $1 billion (projected) in the year 2010. Facebook is #2 website in the world just after Google. More info below in the INFOGRAPHIC:



[Source: MashableMashable.com]

Amazing facts about facebook you should know.http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

Some days back we recorded the first YoungInnovations Private Limited (YIPL) podcast. It was a great experience laughing at our mistakes and seeing each other get stuck when speaking. But overall it was a great experience, we recorded on Content Management System (CMS), why use a CMS, advantages and disadvantages of using a CMS and a simple comparison of the top 3 web CMSes.

(Photo by Zoomar on Flickr)
You can listen to the podcast below, it is hosted by Rabindra Gurung and Me and Prashant Shrestha are the panellist for the discussion :


YIPL Podcast 1: CMS, Why use it, how to choose it sound bite  podcast sound bites


Read the official blog post about why we started the podcast, who is the audience and what we are going to focus in the podcast here. You can listen to the podcast and download it from the YIPL website following this link. Feeback, comments and suggestion are welcome.

Hope you like the podcast and give us your valuable comments and suggestions.http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

After months and months of waiting and some precious rain the load shedding has been slashed to half of what it was. Now the load shedding has been decreased to 6 hours per day from 12 hours a day some months ago.

This must have given relief to all of us but the football world cup 2010 fans may have been disappointed as when the matches air they might not be able to watch their favourite team play. Anyway below is the load shedding schedule of Kathmandu as of 30th May 2010:

(Click on the picture to see full view)
After being choked by blogger for around 20 days for being marked as spam for no apparent reason, this is a new blog post.
Enjoy the less load shedding.http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign is similar to any other marketing/advertisement campaign, the results largely depend on the time, research, energy and money invested. If you can add that extra zing of creativity then it can work wonders for you or your product/service.


Drupal Out of the Box for SEO

Drupal out of the box has good SEO features that makes it Search Engine Friendly (SEF) instantly, just converting a website to Drupal has positive effects on the SEO side. With good themes that have SEF markups and things like javascript (JS) and CSS aggregation in Drupal core it helps to speed up a website and attract search engine bots. Core modules like path helps to define SEF URL for the content of your website with clean URL without the ?q=. If you have path on, I guess the obvious next step is to get pathauto, so I will not include pathauto in my list below.

7 Must have Drupal SEO modules

Below are the 7 modules that will help you get the most out of the already good for SEO content management system (CMS) Drupal, it is just the basics of SEO for Drupal. I'm no SEO expert but from the podcasts I've listened and experiments I've carried out on websites I'm suggesting following modules:

1. Page Title

Many SEO experts and practitioners argue that SEO begins from the top left corner of the browser, its is where you see the page title. If you can set the page title right targeting the keywords then only you have a good beginning as page title is the first thing the search engine bot sniffs. In Drupal core you don't have major control on what to do with your page title and how to display it. Generally its Node Title - Site Name but that may not be right all the time. So to get more control over the page titles you need the page title module.Read its documentation to get started with this gem of a module.(See the page title in the image below)

2. Node Words/Meta Tags

I have heard that Meta Tags are obsolete and many search engines including Google don't look at them these days but I don't know the truth. But if you want a better description of your pages in search engines then the description tag can be set by using this module. You should use the node words module to replace the teaser with something different for the search engines.

3. XML Sitemap

Sitemaps are always a good idea for Search engine bots to know how content is laid out in your website. With priority settings you can tell a bot to see this piece of content with priority and give this piece of content less priority, like your homepage will have more priority than let's say the /about-us/department/marketing page. If you have ever used Google Webmaster tools, you can submit your website, by doing this rather than waiting for Google to crawl your website you are inviting Google search bot to do so. I assume other search engines also have similar facility. With XML Sitemap you can tell the bot to look for page on your website like below (taken from GeshanManandhar.com) :

4.Global Redirect

Using Global redirect helps to enforcing the clean URL and removing trailing slash from your URLs. If you create a node with path auto it has 2 URLs like SITEURL/node/2 and SITEURL/about-us, so as a search engine it sees duplicate content which can be penalized. By using Global Redirect we can solve this and other problems as describes in the Global redirect project page. Check the Readme that comes in the module package to get a better idea on how to make it work and you need this great module.

5. Search 404

If someone types a wrong URL on the website, it will not just show the page not found but will run a search with the parameter provided in the URL. For example if anyone does: http://www.younginnovations.com.np/icimod - the URL is not valid but what Search 404 will do it run a search with word icimod on the YIPL's website and fetch a result as below, this will make the website more user friendly:

6. Google Analytics

If you cannot measure your performance then there is not point running a SEO campaign.One of the best web analytics I have used for no cost is Google Analytics. The Google analytics makes it one step easier for you, you just copy the UA-XXXXXX no and paste it to the settings of the Google Analytics Module, then it will place the java script code and start recording the valuable data that you can view from your Google Analytics dashboard. On top of it you can track certain users, roles or pages and do other things for more see the Google Analytics module's project page.

7. Mollom

This might come as a surprise to many but saving your website from Spam helps a lot in SEO perspective. If your website gets spammed and its public then your site links to black listed websites and it just harms the reputation of your website. Mollom is one of the best centralized solutions for spam. I guess the free version with 100 CAPTCHAs per day will be enough for an average blog or a small corporate website. To know more about Mollom and how it works visit the Mollom website.

Bonus Module

Just as a bonus module for great content to target your keywords a module that is not included in SEO Checklist is Content Optimizer Module, its a very handy module that will be boon to content writers who don't know how to write SEF content. Find out more about Content Optimizer in the Level 10 Design's blog page.

Conclusion and Resources

This is just the beginning, SEO is a big subject in itself. More things you should do for better SEO is validate the code for XHTML and CSS, add social sharing and submit your website to good websites and get back-links. If you want to dig in further of SEO for drupal you can find books on this topic, for starting I'd like you to see the SEO checklist module then install other modules as per need, join the Drupal SEO group at groups.drupal.org and listen to Volacci Drupal SEO podcast, it has 10 great podcasts on Drupal SEO.

Have fun with SEO and I hope you get more visitor and better conversion rate with great targeted SEO. As SEO is pull marketing you might be able to edge out your competition with smart SEO.http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

What does being no. 1 in Google get you? It does not only fetch you a lot of traffic but it can also get you lots of conversion from potential customer to real customers. As search engine optimization (SEO) is a form of pull marketing, it is the customer who is searching for your product or service which helps makes the probability of the consumer buying your product or service higher, unlike push marketing.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) is no black magic, if done correctly and efficiently it can yield amazing results for your online business. A good internet marketing firm can increase your profits with outstanding sales. If you want small business online marketing then choose Guru Marketing group.

With a special focus on local business listing, the services provided by Guru marketing can be ideal for your local business with great products. Even if you sell the best services or products, if the people who want to buy it cannot find it its of little use. So, if you can make your business visible to your potential buyers it will help you get the edge over your competitors.

Reasonably priced at $29.95 per month for power listing, it gives you indexing in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines and links to website, email and maps. With the PowerGold plan at $279 per month you get more than 20 features including a custom website, blog, competitor tracking, monthly reporting etc.

If you want to leave your competition behind and enjoy huge profits then go for small business online marketing.http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog

CodeIgniter is a Model View Controller (MVC) based open source web application framework for use in building dynamic web sites with PHP. It has a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications.

More About CIIts goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. For more information see Codeigniter's official website.

As mentioned above the libraries play a great role when you develop your application in Codeigniter. What really helps you ignite your code, if you are a beginner is the amazing user guide CodeIgniter can boast about. CodeIgniter is most often noted for its speed when compared to other PHP frameworks, see some comparisons here.

The LibrariesWorking with CodeIgniter for past 2 years (but not writing anything about it ;) ), here are three external libraries that are bound to make your life easier when you choose CodeIgniter to develop your web application:


1. EZAuthAlmost all web applications needs an authentication system and there are lots of options for CodeIgniter, among them EZAuth is a great library to complete the work. The developer defines EZAuth as "EzAuth is an open source robust PHP/MySQL user database, authorization, access control list and user session management system all bundled into one solution. Before you reinvent the wheel trying to manage users on your website, try out EzAuth. Oh yeah, we built it with CodeIgniter so you’ll need that too."

You can view the user guide of EZAuth to know more about it, the current version is 0.6.

2. OcularOcular is by far the best templating library for CodeIgniter, I have used Yet Another Templating System (YATS) but Ocular is amazing. It is a Rails inspired template library following convention over configuration.  It is hosted at Google Code and with features like multiple template, partial views, content Yeild its a great library that will meet almost all your templating needs. With CSS and JS aggregation for production in the new version 1.0, its the best for CI for now.


3. DataMapperCodeIgniter does not come with any native Object Relation Mapper (ORM) library but I could found out  IgnitedRecord and DataMapper , after using both to some extent I'd recommend DataMapper. The Over Zealous Edition has some better features than the Datamapper older versions. DataMapper needs the database to be in fifth normal form, and there are some other requirements you can see here.



It is designed to map your Database tables into easy to work with objects, fully aware of the relationships between each other. The use of an ORM framework help you a lot, you have an edge over the native Active Record style of coding. Moreover it is more Object oriented with data persistence and as your tables become objects they know the relationships you defined which makes the Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) process easier.

ConclusionCodeIgniter core has a big list of libraries from form to image manipulation to validation but the above external libraries make it easier to focus more on productivity and creativity and less on the code part of it. You can download and use all the above libraries in your CodeIgniter install, from the relative links.Try out some other fresh libraries by Elliot Haughin, here.

You can find many libraries for codeIgniter, but above there where the ones I liked when I used it and compared it with similar libraries.

Happy Code Igniting and library hunting :).http://geshan.blogspot.com - Geshan's Blog