It seems that for years, unknowingly the Drupal community has been effectively blocking themselves automatically from Google's Image Search. I have been wondering why my Fractal art never gets any Image Search traffic, but I figured it was just that I only have a few available online right now. That isn't actually the case. Drupal currently has what I would consider a bug in it's robots.txt, which blocks your sites folder. I couldn't believe it when I heard it, but it's true.

For quite some time I have been trying to figure out how to get the Aegir hosting system installed, and the other day I found something that has changed my Drupal life forever. It turns out that Omega8, a specialized Drupal hosting company, has put out an installation script that allows you to install their fully optimized Aegir hosting setup. I decided to spin up a Linode 512 hosting account, as Chunkhost has been over booked lately and I have yet to get my Chunk. One of my clients that I had sign up with them just got theirs, so it won't be long I guess until they are back to being able to keep up with capacity. Overall, while testing their beta 512 Chunk, it was great. I had to try this script as soon as possible though, so I gave Linode a shot.

I have created a new Drupal project website that can be found under the Motiv Drupal Projects block in my right sidebar. On this new project site I am focusing on Drupal SEO techniques and using arguments in views. I also plan on leveraging the context module whenever possible, as I feel it will be an easier to manage system than the default Drupal block system. I will most likely be using Panels as well and passing arguments into the panels to display content dynamically on my pages. The idea of the site is to provide useful information on popular types of vacations and popular vacation destinations around the world. Along with this useful information, the site will also provide up to date vacation deals to these destinations. My new Drupal website is called My Vacation Deals.

I have been doing Drupal on the side for a while, but within the last year I have gotten really serious about it. I ended up quitting my full-time job doing search engine optimization in the e-commerce and automotive industries to specifically do Drupal development and Drupal consulting in October of 2009. Since then I have created several sites for clients and have been involved on several other contract projects in conjunction with other companies.

I did a website project for a client recently, using the Concrete5 CMS. The site was for the Ontario Blind Sports Association, so website accessibility was a major concern. After starting the project it became evident that perhaps Concrete5 was not the most accessible CMS, but I adapted some custom code into the site in order to get what the client needed. It wasn't perfect, but there was nothing that the Concrete5 CMS offered in it's addons to achieve a text resize function for those with vision impairments.

I have been toying around with the Managing News and Tattler flavors of Drupal for a while, and recently decided to launch a couple websites to really test them out. I build the first website specifically for Drupal News and follows all the top Drupal news sources for the lastest content with Managing News. The other site I built was a site following all the latest Drupal Buzz from any source that is covering the Drupal keywords I entered using the Tattler app.

It has been a long time coming, mainly because I run several Drupal sites under one multi-site, and had to update the main install first, but I have finally updated the site to Drupal 6. Drupal 5 is basically out of date at this point, as community development on Drupal 7 is already in the works. There are some basic enhancements that have been made to Drupal 6 that make it a much better CMS, right out of the box so to speak.

We have finished porting our original html site into Drupal. This should make for easy addition of new sections, dynamic fractal image and fractal video galleries, and lots of other great features. You can now register to the website and gain extra benefits like Free Fractal Backgrounds and first dibs on New Fractal Art Designs through our newsletter.