http://www.daobydesign.com/blog Tips on blogging, design and the IT industry. Sun, 20 Sep 2009 03:30:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I need first apologize for the length of time between updates. I have no excuse other than an insane work schedule. I, initially at least, was also trying to hold off releasing a new version until I had some significant bugs to fix or features to add. Perhaps it's a ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2009/08/seosimple-joomla-1-5-plugin-v1-4/ A friend of mine just forwarded me this video by The Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper), and I enjoyed it so much that just had to break my DBD blogging silence to share it here. The song lays out, with some slick verse, the importance of Web standards and proper ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2009/05/awesome-seo-rapper-design-coding/ I recently stumbled upon Stuart Bruce's "Top ten ways not to choose a social media consultant". Bruce offers some solid advice for anyone looking to hire a consultant, advisor, or otherwise "expert" in the social media field. My favourites: They describe themselves as an expert. This space is so new and changing ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2009/02/advice-when-choosing-a-social-media-consultant/ As a Web design professional, I am often asked by clients if I can help them with search engine optimization (SEO), to which I almost always say "not really", and then spend 20 minutes typing out the information I am about to share. The truth is, I am certain I could ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/11/basic-seo-theory/ Just stumbled upon this list of humorus taglines for the newly "officially named" Windows 7 and thought I'd share. The list contains more than this, but I wittled it down to my top 20: Windows 7: We heard it’s a lucky number Windows 7: Like Windows 6 — wait, there was no ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/10/funny-taglines-for-windows-7/ I've been using Drupal quite a lot recently, and one of the things that was bothering me was the Recent Comments block. It's excellent that Drupal includes this functionality right out of the box, but that it offers no way to template or otherwise customize it (in Drupal 5.x at ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/10/customize-drupals-recent-comments-block/ One of the first posts I wrote on this blog was a tiny little script that detects whether your visitor is using a particular version (or less) of Internet Explorer and then redirects them to a page explaining that they should get their ass in gear and get a better ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/09/hate-internet-explorer-take-a-stand-against-ie6-browsers/ Man, since I released SEOSimple v1.2 a few weeks ago I've learned a massive lesson - WAY too many people are still using servers that employ PHP4 - the php engine that was replaced with PHP5 four years ago. For anyone that tried to use the plugin with PHP4, I'm sorry ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/09/seosimple-joomla-15-plugin-v13/ As some know, Dao By Design doesn't just create sites for others, we began with and continue to develop sites for ourselves, generally based on my wide-spanning interests. One such site is the Hao Hao Report, a Digg-like social bookmarking/link sharing site that focuses on blog posts and news articles related ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/09/why-i-switched-from-pligg-to-drupal-drigg/ Close on the heels of the release of v1.1 I'm releasing v1.2 of the SEOSimple Joomla 1.5 plugin. I've just tweaked a few things to better support UTF-8 encoding, word wrapping of the descriptions and better handling of the Section and Category page descriptions. Please report any problems you have either on ... http://www.daobydesign.com/blog/2008/07/seosimple-joomla-15-plugin-v12/