We recently installed the Drupal Userpoints module at the site to track posts, rate users, etc. I was running into issues and decided to upgrade to the new Userpoints 2.0.

After upgrading/installing the newer version I continued having trouble so late Saturday evening made a post in the support-forum at Drupal. To my surprise within hours I had a response from Khalid Baheyeldin, the author of the Userpoints module and co-founder of 2Bits.com.

I Responded to Khalid's post Sunday morning and was again surprised to see multiple responses almost immediately after my posts. Khalid then offered to access my system and look into the problem directly. Normally I would never even entertain the idea of giving a complete stranger the passwords to the site, but I have seen (and used) many of Khalid's Drupal modules and 2Bits.com was already on my list for any future Drupal support (like that upgrade to V5 that I'm so afraid to do myself). I emailed the key's to the GrownUp Geek kingdom to Khalid and held my breath.

Long story short: A few minutes later Khalid sent me an email indicating the problem was resolved. A few more very fast emails back and forth, and the Userpoints module was working as advertised.

I have been disappointed with the level of Drupal support in the forums in the past, but in this case not only did I receive a response to my problem, but I was also offered and received personalized support - all on a Sunday morning! Kudos to Khlid, 2Bits.com and Drupal on a job well done!

Naturally, I do not expect this level of free support for all problems (nor should you), but my experience today proves that there are some great Drupal developers out there that not only know what they are doing, but aren't "too good" to help us n00bs.

Thank you Khalid and 2Bits !

Labels: Drupal, Site Development, The Site

¶ 12:43 PM 0 Comments

A quick follow-up to my post from the other day, Making Drupal faster, which was a followup to my post from a month or so back, Drupal Optimization:

After disabling user-avatars at Grown Up Geek, CPU usage has plummeted from daily averages of 35% - 55% down to an amazing 11%-13%. I can say with confidence that this single, simple change has made the greatest impact on site performance since moving from a shared host to our dedicated server.

If your Drupal site is running slow and you have user-avatars enabled, try disabling this feature to see if you get the same astounding results that I did.

Labels: Drupal, Site Development, The Site

¶ 8:59 PM 0 Comments

When I first heard about viral marketing, I thought it had something to do with spreading the word through a virus! Later on when I slogged my way through its index, I was surprised to find I was not far off the mark.

Although it has been around for quite sometime, people really began appreciating the worth of viral campaigns when they saw just how successful Google was with the GMail invite campaign.

The limited number of invites made you feel that it was a huge deal. I was moderating a forum when I received my invite from the forum owner and remember feeling on top of the world.

This is exactly the feeling viral marketing techniques aim to capture. With the proliferation of social networking and bookmaking, my bet is that viral campaigns will assume more importance than ever before. This is because eventually search engines are bound to become smarter and just ignore websites that have no useful content.

Mind you, viral marketing is NOT spamming. The first thing needed for a campaign is a list of people/websites you think are interested in you niche. The idea is to get these people hooked on what you are offering so they can "talk" to their friends and mates about your site.

There are people who swear on a certain technique, but then one man's meat is another man's poison, eh? So stick to the basics initially and then when you find that something works for you, stick with it.

Over at Digital Point forums, znitch-search has an interesting post "10 Contagious Viral Marketing Techniques"

Feel free to add to this post what has worked for you and more importantly what has not!

Labels: Marketing, Site Development

¶ 7:10 PM 0 Comments