Intermediate

I just found this very cool screencast creation tool that is free. It's called Jing. Installation is quick and pretty easy (though it does require the .NET 3.0 libraries for the Windows version).

Here's a sample screencast, a quick demo of cscope as a development tool.

I began the Devbee website back in March as a way to help others by way of documenting what I have learned about Drupal and also to drum up a little bit of business for myself. The content of this site is extremely targeted, and I don't ever expect to see more than a few hundred visits a day. This definitely does not reflect the expectations, or at least hopes, of most website owners. It's typically all about bringing in as many visitors as possible to generate money through advertising or purchases. Sites interested in bringing in large numbers of visitors typically do this by spending a lot of time focusing on "search engine optimization" (SEO). Absolutely nothing can drive traffic to a site like a top placement in the search results on one of the major search engines.

Back in the day (way back during the last millennium), all one needed to do was have a simple HTML page containing relevant words or phrases and he was fairly likely to make a decent showing in results pages. In fact, this is exactly how I shifted from studying literature to building websites. I built my first homepage (don't laugh!) for fun. It was found by an employer, and I got a cool job at a major search engine. Today, it is not so simple.

Fortunately for us, as Drupal users, we have a secret weapon, Drupal itself. Drupal SEO does not require any witchcraft or elaborate HTML trickery. It's simple, and in this article, I'm going to explain how I get consistent premium search placement with very little effort.

PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP generated page is requested, the server must read in the various files needed and "compile" them into something the machine can understand (opcode). A typical Drupal page requires more than a dozen of these bits of code be compiled.

Opcode cache mechanisms preserve this generated code in cache so that it need only be generated a single time to server hundreds or millions of subsequent requests.

Enabling opcode cache will reduce the time it takes to generate a page by up to 90%.

PHP is known for its blazing speed. Why would you want to speed up your PHP applications even more? Well, first and foremost is the coolness factor. Next, you'll increase the capacity of your current server(s) many times over, thereby postponing the inevitable need to add new hardware as your site's popularity explodes. Lastly, high bandwidth, low latency visitors to your site who are currently seeing page load times in the 1-2 second range will be shocked to find your vamped up site serving up pages almost instantaneously. After enabling opcode cache on my own server, I saw page loads drop from about 1.5 seconds to as low as 300ms. Now that's good fun the whole family can enjoy.

You say you want to build a website? It must be feature rich, flexible, extensible, powerful, and very web2.0. This is an important site, and you don't want to be locked in to someone else's framework, so you have decided the smartest approach is DIY. You have a small team of very experienced LAMP developers who have track record building successful sites. They've promised to meet your every requirement. You're new site will look and feel unique. It will not have that distasteful look of so many of these other sites built on one of the open source content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal. Down the road, as you extend your website, you will save lots of money as you won't have to hire developers with specialized skills in a certain CMS. Anyone with sufficient knowledge of Apache, PHP and MySQL can work on the site. A CMS might work wonderfully in many situations, but in your case, you need the power and flexibility only offered by a DIY solution.

Sounding pretty reasonable to you? If not, you may be failing to buy in to some common fallacies.