Halloween Australia has been one of my best performing sites in a couple of ways. It is usually number 1 at Google for Halloween Australia, and also Halloween Events Australia. Probably because it has one of the few dedicated halloween event calendars, listing around 50 events each year, ranging from streets offering trick-or-treating to big commercial events, and it was definitely built with SEO in mind, to get organic traffic. It was light, source-ordered content, highly optimised, and had some nice incoming links. And with Google AdSense and a few affiliate links, it would make October my highest earning month online.

Last halloween it peaked at 1600 hits on 31 October, but at this time of year its still around the 30 visits/day mark, but it’s starting to ramp up now. There have been 4 events added so far, and a magazine contacted me for an interview last month. (Haven’t done it yet).

But it was labour-intensive. I had to manually approve each event, as it was added – actually by editing a field on the database – I had never got around to writing an approval program. And photos were also supposed to be manually uploaded. I didn’t make it easy for people.

So it was time to convert to Drupal again, to get more community oriented.

I took a few shortcuts. Reused my Christmas Drupal template, and just changed the colour scheme. Styled a few view tables that hadn’t needed styling on the old white background.

Then I had to copy the content across. Create new data types for events, recipes, craft, stories. Create new views for each data type. Manually add the events from this year. Check that access was fine for new members. Then importantly, redirect the old URLs (eg halloween-recipes.php) to the new format (/halloween-recipes/).

Elapsed, it took from Fri night to late Sat night, with a few late tweaks on Sunday, to add polls, and finish the redirects. Probably 6 hours all up.

Again, it will be interesting to see how the traffic continues for the new site. Whether the redirects will work properly, or if I lose any ranking at Google for changing the page URLs.

There didn’t seem to be any negative impact on traffic for Womens Health and Fitness – it’s still around 30 visitors/day.

But now it’s time to learn a new CMS for work – goodbye Drupal, and hello Mura. (There goes Sunday afternoon…..)

I shouldn’t, but I take pride in the fact that for each of the five sites I’ve built with Drupal so far, I haven’t had to do any code hacks. The sites have been pure Drupal Core, plus common add-on modules. And the obvious CSS styling. I still haven’t had to learn how to use hooks.

And it’s really nice that it’s so easy to turn Drupal sites into membership sites. Built-in user management. Just turn on Contact Forms, and enable for each user, a personal contact form.

The problem is that the personal member contact forms are only accessible to other logged in members. Anonymous browsers get an “access denied” page.

There are heaps of people on the Drupal forums who want this. But the standard answer is “it’s by design”.

There are threads with detailed code hacks and patches. And I just don’t have time to do them. All I want (and many others want) is the ability to allow members on a site to be contacted without showing their email address in the clear. Just asking to be harvested by spammers.

So on my latest site A Healthy Business I wanted members to have their own pages with contact forms. Experimented with several options. And came back, semi-reluctantly, to using iContact signup forms.

They look handsome. And I know I should be using an autoresponder anyway, to be efficient, which is available through iContact.

I was just a little hesitant. I found iContact a little non-intuitive to setup. To get the effect I wanted on my personal page, with an embedded contact page, I had to setup a List on iContact. Then the autoresponder. Then the campaign. Then the signup form. Create the thank you page on my site (optional, but preferable). It really shouldn’t take that many steps. And I did want to have extra custom fields on my form, but I couldn’t see where to do that.

It should be easier.

Captivate creates SWF content. That’s usually ok, except when I recorded the demo, I used a custom screen size to fit exactly what I wanted onto the screen. That meant that my Super Video converter could not convert the SWF file into another format such as MOV, or MPEG.

So I had to find a site that would allow me to upload SWF videos. Nope, YouTube doesn’t like them, nor Google Video, nor Vimeo. Photobucket will let you, but only for paid upgraded members.

So I Googled swf video sharing sites, and found Megaswf.com. Beautiful!. A few site that lets you upload SWF files – how rare is that – any gives you an address to share it from. It even reformats the size, so it will fit better.

Not sure if there are any bandwidth restrictions, but this is a particular niche. I’ll do a correctly formatted one for other Drupal functions, convert those and upload those to Youtube. Later.

Pretty happy. (You can watch it at Creating Content on Drupal if you like)

It’s a replacement for the shopping site that I lost last year, when the domain renewal email went to an old address I wasn’t using any more. Someone quickly grabbed it, as it had a great ranking at Yahoo, and solid PR, and then offered to sell it back to me for $800. No thanks. I did the work for that once, so he won’t get any profit from me. And it no longer ranks anywhere useful.

MyOnlineShops was completely created with Drupal, an open source Content Management System. I didn’t have to do any code at all – it is pure core Drupal, a large number of contributor modules, and CSS. OK, maybe 10 minutes of html for the page layout, moving a few things around from the default layout.

I obviously have a thing about My…. websites. This is my third, after MyDogSpace and MyDogSite.

The reason for calling it MyOnlineShops, is that it lets me (and free members), create my own list of favourites, have my own shopping blog, my own profile, and make my own reviews and comments on shops I’ve used.

I’m still busily adding more online Australian shops, but feel welcome to suggest any missing ones through the contact form on the site.