This is a step by step setup guide for installing and setting up Drupal 5.7 in under 10 minutes. Now there is always something that comes up along the way that may take longer, but about 10 mintues is all it takes.

I put this together because the Drupal documentation assumes that you already know almost everything before you read it. If you are looking to setup a multisite version of Drupal check out my article:  Installing a Multi-Site Drupal System. It allows you to run multiple sites on a sinlge code base of Drupal.

Engadget just posted an article (Jan '07) on RCA's new Small Wonder EZ201 and the EZ205 . It looks great with mpeg-4 encoding , 1.5-inch, 180 degree swivel LCD display, runs on 2 AA batteries and an SD card slot for memory storage. Oh yeah its only about $129. That's a bar tab for a camcorder. So wow I want more info! Google... Nope... Nada.

I have been trying to increase the rating of my new site The World's Greatest Guy on Google's SERP. I had been #1 on Google for the first 9 months of the sites's life and then it just went away. If was a huge disappointment... Google changed its mind. Yahoo and MSN both list the site as #1 for, of course "the world's greatest guy".

About 1 year ago I bought the domain name theworldsgreatestguy.com as kind of an in-side SEO joke around our office at the start-up PrivaSign. I was trying to SEO our company site and once over beers joked that it would be funny to say to someone in a bar that according to Google I was the "world's greatest guy". Well for about 9 months that is exactly what Google said with very little SEO effort of my own. And then I happened to be in a bar having a few drinks with someone discussing VOIP, start-ups and SEO and mentioned my Google trick. But much to my disappointment Google moved me away to from their list. So off came the gloves.

Yahoo has released a beta URL/website submission service called Yahoo! Site Search.

It allows you to submit a feed of your website pages so Yahoo! will know when you make changes rather than having to submit each and every page each time you update your site. While I am not a user of Yahoo search tools I am happy that I now have an easy way to submit my site for potential Yahoo! surfers.

Google's blog just announced a new Firefox sync extension that "unifies your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers where you install it. It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last closed any of your browsers and gives you a chance to reopen them."

"Persistent Cookies"... so Google has created a tool to make our lives easier while at the same time allowing any website with Google Analytics to track continued visitors. Now if a visitor was hitting a site at work and then made the purchase that evening when they got home, Google Analytics will track them. Not to mention that now your cookie is attached to a Google account ID so this gives Google additional ability to track users across multiple sites.

Like everyone else, I hate arriving to a 404 'page not found'. It's like showing up to a party at the wrong house. Sure you can call and find out where the real party is but in the mean time your just lost. Surfers that arrive to missing pages, if they are like me, will more than likely just leave. After all, google has about another 1,000 results waiting for me.

Editing the .htaccess file is great for permenant URL re-naming using 301 re-directs, but for mis-written URL links, Drupal, the engine running this site and many others, has a great module that can turn these missing pages into real results. Search 404

How to redirect non-www requests to the www.site to reduce risk of SEO penalty

Numerous posts regarding SEO mention that search engines may punish sites for having 'duplicat content' even if that apperant copy is on your own site.

For example my site was available to both httx://isaacbowman AND httx://www.isaacbowman, and due the magic of the internet this can appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Engines don't like seeing content copied for many of the same reasons that we don't like and often fear copies in the real world. Let's face it duplicates can be scary and can be the cause of spammers putting up multiple copies of info just to reap on banner ads.

Google has just released a new service called Google Trends (I wonder how many hours it took for them to come up with that name). It is an amazing new search analysis tool that is perfect for targeted SEO.

Disappointingly it does not give a numerical value to the data, so you cannot assume the relationship between two different searches. However you can see the data from several search terms by seperating them with comas "term1, term2". Also note that you can isolate the trends to specific years, months or regions. The inital changes took quite some time to load but after the switch the results came very fast. As such I didn't waste time changing them much and left it set to "all years" and "USA" for this little test.

"Two-year-old MySpace is a next-generation Friendster--a series of individualized Web pages maintained by some 46.7 million users, who generate 12.5 billion page views a month." - Forbes

Wow... that's very impressive but I still just can't get that excited about even MY MySpace. Sure I stayed up late and tricked out the default page a little. Added some friends and then I just got bored. Its social networking for the sake of social networking. Okay I can understand that concept, but I can also understand the concept of traffic funnelling since after all myspace.com has a Google page rank of 8. Using my MySpace as one more SEO and traffic tool makes me a lot more interested than the quick little "just wanted to say hi" posts.