I recently attended a webinar by Harlan Kilstein and Tom Beal about blog curation that also went into positioning a site on Google without any black-hat tricks that SEO consultants have been trying to sell for thousands of dollars.

I've been saying the same thing and predicting some of Google's recent moves for years. But my potential clients wanted results that I couldn't promise and I actually had some potential clients stand-up and walk away from a meeting with me when I said I wasn't going to use any black-hat techniques.

I found a very good article on merchant accounts on the web but there was some Google Positioning SPAM- I think that is what it is called- so I cut out all the references to the other site that would boast their position in Google and checked all the facts for accuracy.

What on earth is first data credit card processing?

In contrast to absolutely sure outfits you obtain, merchant accounts aren't, "One dimension fits all" or "One type fits all".

If you are writting a module in Drupal7 you may run into problems getting the URL for a file attached. These two lines of code will do it:


$file=file_load($node->field_name["und"][0]['fid']);
$image_link = image_style_url( "thumbnail", $file->uri);


This is a real world example of using a series of flat taxonomy lists to categorize information. We'll be categorizing BMW car models and organizing them by car style and engine displacement. Since the car styles can get complex and car models can have more than one body style but we want don't want any cars listed more than once so we are going to use the flat lists I talked about. The other kind of lists go much deeper into Computer Science theory and data structures.

There are several kinds of images on a computer so which one do you use? They impact the image quality and file size differently because of something called "compression". In other articles I'll discuss the other issues like transparency.

Many businesses, including "mom and pop shops" want to use this new thing called social marketing, but don't know where to start. This article will focus on the Social Media side of the issue. While the details are different with SEO or Search Engine Optimization, the general concept is still the same- great results can happen but expect to either pay thousands of dollars on a campaign or so much time that you can't get your core business done. However, even if it isn't your main push, it needs to be addressed to some degree.

If you have a shell or SSH access to your database server, you can backup the database using mysqldump. By default, the output of the command will dump the contents of the database in SQL statements to your console. Here are some tips on how to get special results such as over a SSH connection,

"Taxonomy" in Drupal is the native way to categorize nodes. So what do you do with the nodes created? You can use it for navigation purposes. A link will get you all nodes with a specific taxonomy set and it can use some boolean logic (and, or or).

If you are already on the Linux command line or inside phpMyAdmin when you need to take a site off-line for maintenance then you may prefer to simply enter the following than log into Drupal and manipulate the setup.

• check if on or offline
  SELECT * FROM variable WHERE name='site_offline'

You migrate you database from a dump but all of a sudden no page is found. No matter what you do you get a 'no page is found'.