Save the dates! Upcoming Drupal Related Events You Should Probably Attend:

We enjoyed Doug Vann’s Post Six Drupal Events in June and thought it would be a good idea to do a little checking on which upcoming Drupal conferences look interesting. We learn a lot by meeting other Drupalists in person at DrupalConSF and it is always good to talk in person. Two of these upcoming events are in our backyard of Texas. Here is our top 7 list to save a date for:

Entrepreneur magazine is a great resource covering many topics impacting entrepreneurs. The magazine recently took a look at the current CMS Turf War. Most small business owners know that the days for a simple landing page or brochure are over. These business owners "get it" and know that they need video, Social Media, SEO, and most importantly content.

We at Guidelight Business Solutions are proud that we attended our first DrupalCon in San Francisco. Our blog is truely not long enough to say Thank You to all who made the DrupalConSF experience extraordinary. However, we encourage you to take a look at our video highlighting the DrupalConSF experience with the Drupal Song as our audio. Yes, Drupal has its own song.

Drush is by far my favorite tool when it comes to working with Drupal. While graphical tools are often easier to use initially, command-line tools more often give you more power and control. The drush project is an active Drupal project with a major release (3.x) in the works. While it does change some of the basic command names, it organizes and restructures the design to make it easier to extend.

Guidelight attended DrupalCon in San Francisco April 19-21, 2010. It was an amazing experience to meet over 3000 people all interested in Drupal. The Drupal Project is full of brilliant people who give back to the Open Source community and at DrupalCon it was possible to meet face to face with the creator Dries Buytaert and other core Drupal developers.

Clouds and cloud services are being used by consumers everywhere and have impacted our lives but are we safe? A few examples are Facebook, Twitter, and the various Google Apps. According to Radu Sion, a computer scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, “If you don’t have everybody using the cloud, you can’t have a cheap service.

I had the pleasure of meeting the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, at SXSWinteractive. In addition to creating Drupal, he’s the CTO of Acquia, and Mollom the spam fighter. The following blog post is a compilation or my notes (tweets) from the @Guidelight account.

First and foremost, Webmasters don’t scale. One challenge they face is the slow pace of innovation from proprietary CMSs. Worse, they have the daunting managing task of administrating content from a universe of end users – each with different styles, goals, and work habits.

I had the fortunate experience as a new member of the Guidelight team to attend both AITP Austin session, “Cloudy with a Chance of Computing” and SXSW Interactive. Both events were very informative and had several interesting and highly opinioned panelists on Cloud Computing. The following blog is a compilation of @Guidelight’s Tweets (Notes) from the related cloud discussions from both of these events. The most interesting panelists from both of these events were Brian Wilson (Surgient), Mark Cathcart (Dell), @whurley, and Josh Koenig (Chapter Three).

Hi world, today is my first blog at Guidelight Business Solutions. I am so excited to be a fellow brain at Guidelight and work with amazingly talented people who rescue troubled software projects as veteran paratroopers.

So, why Guidelight Business Solutions? We steer troubled projects to success; saving our clients and their time and money.

I guess my excitement is justified. Because who wouldn’t want to a part of that?

Look forward to learning more about Drupal and Cloud Computing!

This is what I have learned so far about Clouds:

Google's Chrome just passed Apple's Safari as the number 3 browser on the market today. The number 1 and 2 spots are still held by IE and Firefox respectively:

• 62.9% IE
• 24.61% Firefox
• 4.63% Chrome
• 4.46% Safari
• 2.4% Opera
• 1.16% Others

For details, check out Market Share.

I am asked often about the ins and outs of Amazon Web Services by C-levels, directors and managers. They aren't looking for nitty gritty nuances of scripting with the API of the Elastic Compute Cloud, they are just interested in the general overview of how the 'cloud' works.

We've all taken monsterously long URLs and pasted them into documents, emails and elsewhere. We've also seen shorter URLs - very often used in print material like magazines - that point to odd domain names like bit.ly or tinyurl.com. These shorter links are created by pasting the long URL into one of the many online URL Shortener service providers. Basically, they take your long URL, shorten it into a URL on their site and simply redirect all traffic from the short URL to the long URL you provided.

In addition to the announcement of EC2 Spot Instances, Amazon has also announced the unlimited beta availability of their VPC service offering. The Virtual Private Cloud extends your local network over a VPN connection to the EC2 environment.

On December 14, Amazon announced Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Spot Instances. This new beta service allows consumers to bid on unused EC2 capacity and run instances as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price (which fluctuates based on supply and demand).

According to Amazon, here are a few applications well-suited to EC2 Spot Instances:

Earlier this week, Google announced the launch of their real-time search features. With real-time search you can see updates from Twitter, FriendFeed, news stories, and blogs within seconds of when they are published. The real-time results show up on your search results page in a scrolling Latest Results window.

A few days ago, Google announced the availability of the Google Public DNS. This is a replacement for the DNS service you may already have in place and Google positions this service as being more secure and faster than the average service provider's DNS response time.

Within seconds of arriving at your website, visitors will begin to make assumptions about your organization, and in some cases they will decide to leave the website immediately. Knowing this, do you think your website properly represents your business?

You can use the following checklist to determine if it's time to consider a website update.

My website:

…does not align with my current business goals and strategy.

…is made up of entirely static content.

…has outdated information.

…contains mistakes, typos, and broken links.

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I like words. But frankly, I don't always spell or use them correctly. I might get it right 99.9999% of the time, but there is still the 0.0001% when I need to check on usage. I will also hear a new word in a particular context and want to use it in my communications. If you are like me, then here's a quick tip to expand your lexicon by using new words you hear or read from others.

This week I discovered that Santa has a Twitter account. (Well, actually there are several Santas on Twitter, but that is not the point.) So this holiday season even Old St. Nick is using social media for promotional purposes, but are you?

Although few truths are absolute, there is one truth that is indisputably absolute. That truth is that you know something that others do not. And, Wikipedia wants you to be bold and share this knowledge with the rest of humanity. So, be bold and go to wikipedia and contribute this knowledge.

The well known mono project has just released the new Mono Tools for Visual Studio 1.0. This commercial product plugs into your existing Visual Studio IDE and allows you to develop and debug mono apps. For those unfamiliar with mono, it is a .Net environment for Linux and MacOS machines (although it also runs on Windows and other platforms).

When it comes to creating a website, many companies wonder, "What's wrong with buying off the shelf?" This can be a difficult question, as every company has different needs and requirements, but custom web design and development offers some definite advantages.

Technorati, the first blog search engine, has released a new beta version of their website. As you can tell from the site's support forums, the new website has met with some mixed reviews. In the least, it seems that Technorati could have done a better job communicating with their members before the new changes took effect.

The redesigned Technorati site has the following features:

Amazon Web Services is now in a beta release of its newest service called the Relational Database Service (RDS). The announcement states that RDS is:

If you have ever maintained a Drupal site, you know that keeping up with the continuous stream of module updates can be a daunting task. If you manually download, unpack, install, then run an update for each module you might as well get a good cup of coffee and be prepared for some sysadmin time.

October 24, 2009 - Whitehouse.gov is now based on the open source content management system Drupal. A press release to the Associated Press on Saturday reports that a software package purchased at the end of the Bush administration was ill suited as an online platform for the tech-savvy Obama team.

Due to some unfortunate events, I recently had to return my BlackBerry and receive a new one. I was not excited about moving all of my information over. I had yet to sync my contacts, calendar, etc. with my computer because I have a Mac. I previously looked into some software options that would allow me to sync the two devices, but I was slightly turned off by the price/features so I held off.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website's search engine page rank, thereby increasing traffic and attracting prospective customers. Here are 5 SEO necessities to increase your search engine visibility and improve your page rank:

Ever try to delete a file in XP and watch as it takes 20 or 30 seconds?

The delay is because XP searches the recycle bin for similarly named items before deleting them (i.e. adding them to the recycle bin). This takes time - don't ask me why, since it takes nearly no time in Linux.

Ecommerce Tip - Make customers feel safe and secure.

When it comes to sharing information over the internet, fraud and identity theft are always a concern. It is important that your site use security encryption measures, such as SSL or TSL, to ensure the safety of customer information. You can then put customers at ease by displaying security badges on your web pages so shoppers know that they are protected.

This post is number 10 of 10 in a series of ecommerce tips.