$4.95 Domain Names

Looks like you can get cheap domain names. Yes I do get a referral fee, but damn this looks like a good deal.

How To Display Search Box For Everyone

I could create a whole web site of drupal "how to"'s... One other setting you will want to configure is the search box. I messed around with the menu's for about 20 minutes before searching the forums and finding this link: http://drupal.org/node/59717. If you look there you'll see you can enable the search box to appear for everyone by going to administer | access control once you are logged in as administer. Then check off the box for anonymous users to see the search box and you are set. Of course now I have the search box appearing twice on my site... but that's ok.

How To Configure Clean URL Support

And why you would want it...

As I am finding out, drupal has lots of modules and lots of settings. You could probably spend an entire lifetime understanding them all. One of the challenges of the non-wiki format is that posts and comments on drupal.org from people who are providing help become out of date. So instead of a "master" article being corrected an updated (a la wikipedia), you have to scroll through the entire set of posts to see the most recent. Of course, you see the oldest posts first, then the newest at the very bottom. But when you're looking for help, you really want to see the newest posts at the top and the oldest posts at the bottom (like a blog).

In any case, the reason you would want Clean URLs is that clean URLs are SEO-friendly. The reason you want SEO-friendly URLs is that they are more easily indexed by the search engine spiders, and besides, they look nicer to users. An "dirty" URL is of the form www.mysite.com?q=node/4, whereas a "clean" URL is of the form www.mysite.com/node/4. The different is in the ?q=, which can confuse some spiders and annoy humans.

Why doesn't drupal ship with clean URL support on by default? Because... they expect you to be an admin! The real reason is that some web servers aren't configured to support the rewriting necessary to get from the "dirty" format to the "clean" format, resulting in an installation that doesn't work and no way to fix it. This is sometimes the case on shared hosting servers. Kind of reminds me of installing old revs of Linux before Red Hat and SuSE matured the installation process. They use to configure everything even for the 1% case rather than focusing on the 90% case.

So to configure Clean URL support, check this out. The bottom line is you can just go to Administer | Settings | General Settings then scroll down till you see Clean URL support. Don't see it? I didn't see it the first time either. Try using your web browser's search function. You'll need to run the "clean URL test" (look for the little link) first.

If you look on the drupal web site, you'll find many of the comments are out of date (as I indicated earlier). You'll see that the most recent versions of drupal don't require you to modify the Apache .htaccess configuration files directly - you can simply change the setting via the drupal administration interface.

What Is Drupal?

I had lunch with Gus Tai today (Gus is one of my favorite guys in the venture industry and a fun guy in general). He asked me about my recent posts on drupal.

Drupal is a content management system (CMS). Drupal allows you to create a web site intended for groups of people to interact. I don't know if www.newsvine.com is hosted on drupal, but it could be. Unlike a wiki, the idea is not that multiple people collaborate on specific articles. Rather, it is sort of an advanced version of internet forums. It allows one person to post an article and then for lots of people to comment on it. It also has lots of nice features built-in, like support for voting and polls, the ability to show you who is currently online, to syndicate new posts in the form of RSS, and so on.

In a sense it's kind of like a group blog. If you consider that a blog is for one person to post their thoughts and other people to comment, then a drupal hosted site is like getting a newspaper article and "letters to the editor" in real time. Multiple people can post their thoughts in the form of articles, and multiple people can comment on those posts.