As with previous years, I met a ton of new people at the SXSW conference. I have to admit that I was very much looking to meet Dries Buytaert. Belgium-based Dries is the founder of the Drupal CMS. If you are a regular reader of CN, you know that all of our sites were in Drupal until a year ago when we shifted to WordPress. I always liked Drupal but the admin interface just isn’t as usable as the WordPress admin interface. Dries told me that the upcoming Drupal 7 release will have a redesigned admin interface.

Check out my video discussion with Dries below (make sure to watch in HD!). We talk about SXSW, the upcoming Drupal 7 release and the Drupal Gardens product. Drupal Gardens is a service provided by Acquia. Drupal Gardens is basically a hosted Drupal service similar to the WordPress.com hosted service.

Dries notes that the Drupal 7 release has a focus on usability (they hired usability experts to help make the product stronger). They are also making lots of improvements for developers – including better APIs and better database abstraction layers. The Drupal 7 release is in alpha and they are hoping to get it out in public within the next few months.

Find more stories about: drupal, Interviews, sxsw, SXSW 2010, Video, videos

Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to WordPress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

Find more stories about: CenterNetworks, drupal, Google, search, wordpress

Since CenterNetworks relaunched in late 2006, we’ve used Drupal as our content management system. I’ve been a fan of Drupal (along with a variety of other CMS systems) and selected it because I wanted a system that could expand past a simple blog. Last week, I switched CenterNetworks to utilize the WordPress CMS and I’d like to share some of my thoughts regarding the change.

I’d like to first thank several people who have helped tremendously in the conversion and post-conversion efforts. They include Terry Smith, Zach and Rob La Gesse from Mosso, Matt Cutts from Google and Mark Jaquith. Each of them went way above-and-beyond to help me and I very much appreciate their effort.

When Matt Mullenweg provided a demo of WordPress 2.7 last year in NYC, I immediately fell in love with the administration control panel. The admin panel has been one of my biggest frustrations with Drupal. The Drupal admin feels like it was developed by a developer while the WordPress admin feels like it was developed by an end-user. With thousands of posts, it was just difficult to manage. We have a variety of excellent contributors and I’d love to be able to let them post their own stories but never was able to get it working in Drupal. Actually I could have easily created an account for each contributor but the usability was at a point that I feared that their stories might never get posted correctly.

The other two major factors that influenced my decision were that the admin can handle timed postings and auto-save. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve lost over the last two years because I accidentally clicked something and lost the entire post. And many of you know how I feel about broken embargoes so it would be great to actually have timed posting that I can trust.

In terms of theming and front-end capabilities, I’d say that Drupal and WordPress are basically even. Both have amazing user communities and support channels. It seems like it’s easier to install plugins in WordPress while Drupal is more extendable in terms of functionality. I do believe that WordPress is no longer just a blog platform, but a CMS just like Joomla, Drupal, etc.

As my startup continues to grow, the final decision was based around the administration control panel. If I could cut out even just a few minutes out of writing and processing each blog post, it could add up to a chunk of additional time I can devote to my startup. So the decision was made — I will move CenterNetworks to WordPress. I still plan to support the Drupal community as much as I can and will consider using it for future projects.

I used InsideTransit as my testing ground and moved that from Drupal to WordPress as well. I will post all of the technical details of the conversion later this week on HTMLCenter. After about 100 (no kidding) revisions of the SQL queries and a lot of help from Terry, we got the conversion done and live.

That’s when the fun started. And by fun, I mean URL hell. You see, it appears that over 1,000 URLs broke because of the structure that Drupal uses for URLs. So one-by-one I had to fix each one – I’ve spent over 48 hours and they still aren’t done – but I am close. What’s interesting is that Google is so fast to index content that as quickly as I fix each broken link, Google was indexing the new link (which was also broken). So close I ordered a celebratory pizza in anticipation for tomorrow.

I thought that once I fix the URLs, my fun would be over and I could get back to writing content and programming on my startup. Again, I was wrong. As I was cleaning up the URLs, I noticed the site template was off in layout. Took a look at the source and hello spam URLs. It’s a good thing I don’t drink :)

I don’t want to share the details of the exploits until I hear back from some of the parties who are investigating the matter. If you’d like the details, send me an email and I will share the details. All of the people I listed above have just been amazing with helping me get the exploit removed and working to get the Google warnings removed. I plan to thank them in the best way I know how — which is to send them NYC transit merchandise. The last piece is to confirm that the Google warnings have been removed.

I will also post later this week my thoughts about Mosso/Rackspace – for now let’s say that they have very good customer service.

So with that, we are now on WordPress and I think the site should look/act/function the same as before. Replies to comments seems to not be working properly so I’ve turned it off for now. I think the site loads faster than before – give it a try and leave your thoughts in the comments. There is currently no job board on the site – I am working to get one installed and will post an announcement once the job board is live.

Lastly I’d like to apologize for the lack of content around here the last two weeks or so. Now that all of the backend work is done, we can get back to writing content that makes you think. I have a few posts in the hopper this week that will certainly make you think. I appreciate your patience during this transition. Please leave your thoughts and/or any bugs in the comments.

Find more stories about: CenterNetworks, drupal, Mosso, wordpress

We initially reviewed spam prevention service Mollom back in April and I noted that it gave me back an hour a day because I didn’t need to spend as much time picking out the good comments in the thousands of spams we get a day. I worked with the Mollom team of Dries and Benjamin over the summer to get the plugin working correctly on CN. There were tweaks on both sides that needed to be implemented because of our cloud computing setup.

Since the kinks were resolved, Mollom has worked really well. It seems at this point that only Svetlana has issues posting comments from Russia – no matter what I’ve tried, I can’t get them to come through! Mollom has been working as well on CN with our Drupal setup as Akismet works on our WordPress-based blogs.

Mollom has made three big announcements over the past week: leaving the beta period, hit 10 million blocked spams and their pricing model.

The pricing model is listed on the Mollom site and there are free and paid options. The differences are simple. The free account is limited to 100 blocked spams a day and there’s no uptime guarantee. The paid plan is $30/month 30 Euros/month and blocks up to 10,000 spams a day and has a more robust environment and support policy.

I don’t see many WordPress users switching from Akismet to Mollom. I do imagine that with the right marketing plan, Mollom could do very well for a variety of CMS and blog platforms that don’t already incorporate a spam protection tool. Once the base is strong, then go after the platforms that have built-in spam protection tools.

We are going to remain on as a tester for Mollom going forward to provide feedback and a testing platform as they improve the service. My hope is that they will create hooks into other Drupal features like trackbacks – I sure would love to turn those back on sometime!

Update: Andrew has a good spam prevention comparison from earlier this year.

Find more stories about: drupal, Mollom, Quick News, spam

Video messageboard and now blog commenting service Seesmic has now taken up residence inside the Drupal content management system (CMS). Unfortunately it’s not a blog plugin like those fine folks using WordPress have, it’s just an API module hook. So basically what this means is that you can tie Seesmic into other modules on Drupal but you can’t use this as a stand-alone module to add the Seesmic functionality. They note that the full video comment functionality is coming soon to Drupal. I will report back once I have a chance to test the full functionality.

I believe Viddler’s video comment system has a Drupal option but their servers are down so I can’t verify.

Check out our prior Seesmic coverage including our reasoning as to why Seesmic won’t work. Though I will admit that Loic has some amazing connections that could put the product over the top. I do notice that the Seesmic video comments plugin provides Seesmic with some really juicy SEO with the way the links are setup. This could help Seesmic gain ground in the all important video discovery arena.

Find more stories about: drupal, Quick News, Seesmic, Video

New Modules Make it Easy for Drupal Users to Metatag their Content, Increasing Search Relevance and Accessibility on the Web

The SemTech 2008 Conference – San Jose, CA – May 19, 2008 – Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI; TSX: TRI; LSE: TRIL: NASDAQ: TRIN) and Phase2 Technology have debuted three Calais modules for integration with Drupal, the open source content management platform that supports a variety of Web sites ranging from blogs and online publishers to large interactive communities.

Calais is Thomson Reuters’ Semantic Web Service that enables publishers to automatically metatag the people, places, facts and events in their content to increase its search accessibility on the Web.

The Calais modules for Drupal are feature-rich, highly intuitive and designed to make it easy for Drupal users to automatically metatag their content, generating rich semantic metadata that can be shared via a simple key and integrated into the larger content universe.

"Calais is a natural fit for our experience implementing Drupal on media and publishing sites," said Jeff Walpole, Managing Partner, Phase2 Technology. "We’ll continue our work on Calais and are excited about the functionality these modules will provide to the news and information business."

"Enabling the Semantic Web is an exciting frontier for the future of the Web and a key opportunity for Drupal," said Dries Buytaert, creator of the Drupal open source project and co-founder of Acquia. "We welcome Calais to our community and encourage its future development."

The modules use the power of Calais to suggest terms for association within a piece of content, similar to how del.icio.us recommends relevant tags. They also enable Drupal users to integrate their own publisher- and user-generated metadata as they go forward, to truly customize their installation.

"We’re extremely pleased to be working with Phase2 Technology to provide Drupal users with everything they need to tap Calais’s rich metatagging capabilities," said Thomas Tague, Calais evangelist and project lead, Thomson Reuters. "The new modules make it easy for Drupal users large and small to launch automated metatagging and take advantage of the Semantic Web."

Availability: The Calais modules for Drupal are available now. To learn more, please visit the Calais section of the Phase2 Technology site. Demos can be found here: http://calais.phase2technology.com/content/calais-demo-screencast.

About Drupal

Drupal is open source social publishing software that empowers individuals, teams, and communities to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a Web site. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different Web sites, including community Web portals, corporate Web sites, social networking sites and much more. For more information on Drupal, go to www.drupal.org.

About Calais

The Calais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters’ mission to deliver pervasive intelligent information. It leverages the company’s substantial investment in semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing to offer free metadata generation services, developer tools and an open standard for the generation of semantic content. For more information or to get started with the Calais API, go to OpenCalais.com.

About Phase2 Technology

Phase2 Technology is a leading provider of adaptable web software solutions, application development and consulting services. The company specializes in content management systems, content exchange, CRM and online publishing and community tools. We apply our unique Agile Approach methodology to every project and have particular expertise in Drupal, CiviCRM and custom Java applications. The Phase2 Technology development team has been highly active in the Drupal community for several years. For more information, go to www.phase2technology.com.

About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. The company combines industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, healthcare and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs more than 50,000 people in 93 countries. Thomson Reuters shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: TRI); Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TRI); London Stock Exchange (LSE: TRIL); and Nasdaq (NASDAQ: TRIN). For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

Media Contacts:
Tiffany Shackelford
Phase2 Technology
703 548 6050 x 100
Tiffany@Phase2technology.com

Krista Thomas
Thomson Reuters
415 202 3523
Krista.Thomas@ThomsonReuters.com

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this post may not necessarily represent the views of CenterNetworks. This press release was paid for and provided in its entirety by Thomson Reuters.

Find more stories about: Calais, drupal, Press Releases

Ten days ago we posted a review of the new Mollom spam protection system. What I learned over the next few days is that every comment/tech directory listing that a CN reader attempted to post was hit with a message suggesting that the comments or tech directory listing might be spam.

I posted a message on the Mollom support forum along with the Drupal support forum.  Thursday I decided to attempt to email the Mollom founders, explain the situation and tell them that if we can’t get this fixed, I will need to remove Mollom as my readers are mad!

After a brief email exchange with founders Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytaert, they were able to get the problem fixed. Apparently there was a bug that caused some sites (i.e. ours) to force all comments to show as "unsure". The "unsure" flag forces the CAPTCHA validation.

In summary, the issue has been resolved and you should now be able to comment quickly and easily. Big thanks to Dries and Benjamin for immediately resolving the issue and thank you for your patience!

On a related topic, you can now subscribe when you post a comment. Check the subscribe box and you will receive an email when someone replies. It’s a great way to keep the conversation going!

Find more stories about: drupal, Mollom, Quick News, spam

Here on CenterNetworks, we use the Drupal content management system and have tried a variety of spam blocking applications. Earlier this month on HTMLCenter, I explained how I believe spammers are able to attack posts we create within 1 second of posting. I’ve tried the basic spam plugin which was barely effective, Akismet which I believe is the most popular spam protection service and now we are using Mollom.

On our WordPress blogs, Akismet is awesome and blocks nearly all the comment spam that comes in. For some reason with Drupal, it seemed to let through a good bit of spam both in comments and in the Web Directory.

Last weekend I installed the new Mollom spam prevention service. Mollom was founded by Dries Buytaert who also founded the Drupal project. Perhaps that’s why the first Mollom plugin is for Drupal. Installation went very smoothly and I was up and running in minutes. The plugin provides a chart showing the number of spam messages destroyed by Mollom.

Mollom works differently than Akismet and also different than CAPTCHA verification. CAPTCHA verification forces each user to enter a code to let the system know they are human. I found adding this forced verification reduced the number of comments on CN – you want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact.

At a basic level, Akismet looks at each comment, compares it to their list of spam and if it’s deemed to be spam, it goes into a folder which you then have to check (or set to delete). I found that while Akismet caught the majority of the spam, going through the pages of spam looking for the few legitimate comments was taking nearly an hour a day.

Mollom works differently. When you post a comment on CN, Mollom scans the comment and if Mollom thinks it might be spam, it sends you to the CAPTCHA page. So while a few real comments might get sent to the CAPTCHA page, the majority go through without ever knowing Mollom is active. Here’s where Mollom gets bonus points. By sending the potential spams to the CAPTCHA page, I never see them and they aren’t in a spam folder – they just don’t make it. Hello one hour at the gym! So far, one spam comment made it to the live page – but it appears that comment was from a human.

Mollom works on the same pricing model as Akismet – free for most, pay for the largest sites and those that need customizations.

I’d like to see Dries add the ability to customize the message that a reader sees when Mollom thinks the comment might be spam. Right now the message suggests that the message might be spam and frankly if it isn’t sure, just ask the reader to enter the code, no reason is frankly needed. No reason to potentially piss off a reader.

There’s only one part of CenterNetworks that Mollom does not currently protect — trackbacks. If Mollom could remove the 8,000-10,000 trackback spams we get a day, I could easily turn them back on the site. Currently I have to manually look through each batch of 500 at a time to find the one valid one in between the 499 spams. It is just out of control.

Both Akismet and Mollom are some of the best spam protection services out there and while some bash when they miss, just think about if they weren’t around. I will report back after a longer period of time with more stats.

Find more stories about: Akismet, drupal, Mollom, Reviews, spam

Quick announcement that the latest version of Drupal is live. It’s the 6.0 release and is the most robust to-date. We use Drupal on CN and after working with some of the largest CMS packages over the past 12 years, I can tell you that Drupal is the best I’ve worked with. The flexibility is awesome and the admin makes life easy.

There are too many new features to list here so check out what Drupal calls the “easiest version ever”. One of the biggest new features is drag and drop site admin which is similar to the modules option in the latest WordPress version. There’s also an in-depth screencast of the new features.

The only downside to upgrading is that you must have 6.0 versions of every contributed module used on your site or there might be pieces of the site that are broken. I will post another note once we’ve upgraded.

Find more stories about: drupal, Reviews

Back in August, we covered the NYC Drupal meetup at the Fast Company HQ in lower Manhattan. Fast Company showed off an early version of their new Web site which is built entirely in Drupal (as is CN).

As of this morning, the new site is live. While we normally don’t dive heavy into the backend technology, I’d say that the new Fast Company is utilizing the full power of Drupal. Lots of strong caching is in place, along with some other options within the config that help with loads. It looks like not all of the pages have been converted yet.

Here is an example page: This one asks users to provide input on who is the most creative mind in business today. Looks like Kevin Rose of Digg fame is a popular choice. I like the way they have worked to get site visitors involved in the site.

They are also using user profiles and groups — something we haven’t implemented yet. Once registered you can also setup your own blog within the Fast Company Web site.

Lastly, new acquisition Robert Scoble has his own section of the site. It includes his latest links from his link blog and other posts and videos by Scoble. While this looks like it was also part of the old site, I am guessing this will be a main piece of his online home when FastCompany.tv launches next month.

Find more stories about: drupal, Fast Company, NYC, Reviews

Quick note: We are now in the process of upgrading Drupal. Things might appear broken during the transition. Please remain calm with your hands and feet inside the site at all times. We expect the upgrade to be complete within 4-5 hours max. While we don't expect any downtime, you might have to refresh multiple times to view your desired page. Thank you for your patience.

Find more stories about: drupal, Quick News

Tonight I had the pleasure of sitting with about thirty Drupal folks of all experience levels down by the World Trade Center. This space will always hold a special place in my heart as it was the first place I worked after college and lost a lot of friends on 9/11. It's always a bit emotional to go back there. So many tourists taking pictures and videos of the area.

Ok, on to the meetup. The meetup was hosted by Mansueto Digital. They produce magazines such as Fast Company, Inc., and IncTechnology. Awesome space, but where were the drinks! At least water in a cooler? Deduct 4 points for no water offering during the summer.

First up was a man who spoke about using Drupal for DNA research. Way over my head but it looked very interesting. Basically he has a 30 gig database of DNA "stuff" which he is using drupal to pull out his specific needed content and creating new content pages from the mashed-up content. It's not live so I can't link to it, but it was groovy.

Next up was Paul Maiorana from Mansueto Digital who took us thru the new FastCompany web site. I have a video but Paul asked me not to post it as it contains their development url which is not secured. From what I can tell, it's a start page plus a social network all built on Drupal with some external help from the Lullabot team.  They are looking to hire two Drupal developers, if interested drop me a line and I will put you in contact with Paul.

Last up was a developer who seemed to be willing to make demands on the clients or pass on the work. He showed us his latest work at Thehotreportonline.com which uses a flash replacement option to create the text based on font switching – was pretty neat.

I am still so impressed by the amount of community we have around the software and programs we use online. Here are 30 people all willing to help others for free with their questions and concerns. We should never forget how great we have it. Get out to a meetup sometime and share your knowledge and learn something new.

Here are my pictures from the event – check out the last one – it's one of my best photos – awesome reflection off the buildings back inside to the wall.

Find more stories about: Conferences, drupal

I decided to take today and use it as a public relations day for the Fat-Off. Thanks to Scott, I sent about 20 PR e-mails to other weight loss community sites to see if they would either participate or provide some coverage for the Fat-Off. And I contacted PRWeb about creating a press release. They want $299 to create the release which frankly I would rather not spend right now. So I may have a friend work on the press relase. Let me know if you have any other ideas for getting the word out about the Fat-Off.

I have the review for RunFatBoy about 85% complete but decided to do some exciting PHP code for the evening. I figure I have enough weight to lose that RFB can hold for another day :)

You will see some changes and you won’t see other changes I made. But I assure you that all of them will help enhance your experience in using CenterNetworks. Some of the changes include:

• Addition of a Get Involved bar at the top of all content pages – this should help with the viral ability of the site
• New style for comments – still working this out a bit
• Faster page rendering
• Other misc tweaks which I cannot share since we are on a code orange alert level

We will be applying to be a 9rules site on Wednesday, I wonder if they will accept us.

Find more stories about: drupal, Fat-off, pr, public relations