General Web

This article covers some common tips to improve the quality of your content both for your audience and for search engines.  It expands on our earlier Content Strategy and SEO Strategy articles.

Quick demo of what we are going to discuss
Original session was posted here
With launch of iPad and NexusOne - iPhone/Android application market can't be ignored. Both these technologies has great potential to use our existing web based tools such as drupal. You can totally use drupal to manage/update your iPhone/Android native application.

CivicActions is proud to sponsor the She's Geeky unconference scheduled to be held for three days in the San Francisco Bay Area starting on January 29th, starting at 9am.  

(I'm planning on migrating a lot of the content I/we generate for our team newsletter to the blog, so for the CivicActions team, you'll be getting more information about what we're up to on the blog than in our internal newsletter.  For the rest of the world, it'll mean a more transparent view into what we're doing at CivicActions and how we do it.  We were founded on, and value, the principles of openness and we intend to dive even deeper into expressing the values of transparency, collaboration and participation.)

This past year, CivicActions has undergone a transformation in the way that we organize project teams.  We've moved from a "matrix" model (people contributing to several projects) to what we call "Pods" (dedicated teams focused on one or two projects at a time). This transformation has yielded incredible results for clients and project team members. This model also means that we can more easily scale, which we are preparing to do in 2010.

Idealist.org just hatched a campaign to create a decentralized and adaptable network of idealists. Within the first few days of launch, people from over 140 countries have signed up. For what? Well, I'm not quite sure, and Idealist.org isn't either. This is a network experiment and, as they explain on their site, it will transparently evolve with feedback from the participants.

In addition to its activist merit, the campaign is an example of an ingenious brand-building strategy. Idealist.org's website offers the standard features for sharing the idealist logo on social networking sites and forwarding to friends. More significantly, however, participants conflate a personal attribute and the organization's name as one and the same. Strong brand names offer that kind of potential. I'm an idealist, are you?

I'm part of another decentralized network of idealists: CivicActions. Decentralization provides CivicActions with strategic advantages; the organization can quickly tap local technological and cultural trends, work with the best talent in the world, and communicate with a global audience. I'm a CivicActioner, are you? We love to partner with smart, idealistic organizations and individuals. Contact us and let's get the conversation started.

We recently upgraded core for civicactions.com, and found a nasty bug where comments were no longer appearing on blog posts. They were listed in the admin, and even in the Recent Posts block, but would not show after the blog content.

After some sleuthing, I discovered an error message in dblog whenever a blog page was visited:

Miley Cyrus closed her account and quit Twitter with an apparent DIY Youtube rap video called "Goodbye Twitter," wherein she oh-so-eloquently extolls the value of quality in-person time over endlessly updating a stream of personal trivia as the reason for leaving the service. Does Miley's move foreshadow the complete abandonment of social media for tweens and teens?

An important part of bulding mobile websites is automatic detection of the user-agent (mobile device) so you can switch to an appropriate theme, or re-configure the layout for your mobile browsing. Once you've detected the device, you can present the website in a theme tailored to it.

This second post in my series of tutorials on mobile themes for Drupal focuses on how to implement automatic user-agent detection and switch your base theme to a mobile theme.

The iPhone and iPod touch continue to gain market share of mobile web traffic. According to edibleapple 48% of all smartphone web requests in the US come from iPhones, while Windows and RIM devices together comprised 34% of mobile web requests.
These numbers show that it is becoming increasingly important to have iPhone compatible websites.