Tutorial - Web Development Articles

Preventing development and staging sites from showing up in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 03/13/2012 - 17:45

At some point, most developers have found that, despite their best efforts, one of their staging or develoment sites has been found by Google or other search engines. Usually, this is because we must make the work available for preview to the client before the site goes live to the world. Without careful planning, it can be tricky to show a staging site to a client, but not to Google. Do not assume that, because you haven't submitted a URL to search engines, they won't find your site. Take proactive measures to keep your dev and staging sites out of search engines.

Wrangling meta tags in Drupal site to control description in Google search results

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 11:02

If you've ever been confused by where Google derives the text for search results pages, you're not alone. I was surprised today to find my description in Google had recently changed.

Indianapolis Drupal Development – Search results listing

The text "Offers web application development, content management..." is nowhere on my site.

Google uses a few different sources for the description snippets in search results:

Tackling Hierarchical Menu Issues with Drupal and jQuery

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 15:23

One of the decisions we make when creating a hierarchical menu for a website is whether to create a "landing page" for each section. In other words, does each parent menu item have its own page?

There are three options. Each parent item can:

Getting In-Page Analytics Working with Drupal Google Analytics Module

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 11/27/2011 - 12:40

It's amazing how much time we need to spend tweaking all our development tools to keep them all playing together nicely. So when I find a problem that takes me a while to fix, I like to post it here in the hope that it will save someone else some time.

Such was the case today when I switched over to the latest version of Google Analytics. In-Page Analytics, one of my favorite tools in GA, stopped working on all my Drupal sites.

Here's the error message I got:

Problem loading In-Page Analytics

Adding the Photos Tab Back to Your Facebook Page

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Fri, 04/01/2011 - 12:10

If you're like me, you probably find that Facebook changes so quickly that it's hard to keep up. Sometimes, it seems something disappears for no reason. And Facebook's user interface is often very confusing; finding the right control panel is daunting, to say the least.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to add some portfolio photos to my company's Facebook page. That's easy enough... but for some reason, the Photos link was no longer in the menu in the left sidebar.

Adding Your Blog to Your Facebook Company (Fan) Page

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/31/2011 - 14:31

Linking your social media platforms together can help you communicate more efficiently. One way to do this is to insert your blog feed into your Facebook business page (or "fan" page, as it used to be called).

Xdebug not working after Netbeans Update (on MAMP)

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 03/16/2011 - 15:11

If you use NetBeans IDE and Xdebug for PHP development, at some point, there's a chance you'll run into this. Today, my debugger suddenly stopped working without warning. A quick search at Stackoverflow confirms that lots of people have issues getting and keeping Netbeans and Xdebug talking. I spent several hours trying to determine what caused this.

Inserting JavaScript and jQuery into Drupal

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/10/2011 - 22:55

In a previous article, I showed how to track comments and contact form submissions using Google Analytics' goals. The method I described involved adding jQuery. So I thought I'd take a few minutes to show how to write custom jQuery or other JavaScript and include it on a Drupal page.

Real-Time Stats in Google Analytics?

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 18:34

I thought I'd share a useful trick in Google Analytics to show nearly real-time statistics. For anyone who has used Analytics for any length of time, this is probably very obvious. But I have to admit it's kind of hidden... I didn't notice it for quite some time.

ROI: Tracking form submissions in Google Analytics

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 10:48

The most important role of any stats software like Google Analytics is tracking the return on investment of your web site. One way to do this is through Analytics' "goals". By setting custom goals for your site within Analytics, you can track how many times your web site fulfills its primary purpose of converting viewers into contacts or paying customers.