I use GoDaddy for my hosting provider and they have a simple way for installing Drupal 6 for the web hosting account. Click a button and choose some usernames/passwords for the mysql and Drupal admin accounts and it will do the install for you. Adding third-party modules requires ftp'ing to your GoDaddy account and putting them in the correct location which is more cumbersome than if you have a shell account.

I couldn't remember when I grabbed my kristen.org domain, so I just did a "whois" search at internic.net and found that it was in 1999... boy, I feel old.

When I first got the domain, I simply parked my resume on the home page and that was that. Except for occasional minor resume changes, it wasn't until a few years ago that the site changed in any significant way. I switched my hosting provider to GoDaddy since it was cheaper and better than my previous provider.

I updated this website so I can explain some basic SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, particularly how you setup Drupal SEO. There are lots of websites that explain SEO, so I won't go into too much detail here... simply the very basics. Once I get into configuring Drupal for search engine optimization, more details will be filled in.

I just set up Google Analytics on Drupal for kristen.org and some other sites I'm working on. I have used awstats in the past but not Google Analytics but everyone was raving about it, so now I can see what's the buzz.

First, I signed up with Google Analytics which is (of course) free. Also, you can set up several websites in your account as well as share accounts and create multiple accounts. Very handy.

I setup Drupal on kristen.org a couple weeks ago. I intentionally set it up with
the base installation and didn't add any 3rd party modules. The reason being
that I set up this site to show how you can add in various Drupal modules and
configure Drupal for SEO (search engine optimization). Thus far, I've done very
little SEO on the site besides the first 5 steps in my
Basic SEO Top 10 list for a few blog posts and articles. The only extra
module l did add in the Drupal Google Analytics module for
tracking purposes.

The Drupal pathauto module is a great tool for giving your content names based on the content titles. For example, the title of this blog post (node) is "Drupal Pathauto Module" so once it is saved with an automatic alias, the URL alias will be "drupal-pathauto-module" which is much easier to remember than node/9.

So, to get your SEO-friendly URLs, simply:

1) download pathauto
2) untar the files and place in sites/all/modules/pathauto directory
3) enable path and pathauto modules at system/build/modules

The Drupal path and pathauto modules are great, but also can cause us some problems. Google does not like it when more than one URL yields the same results. The path and pathauto modules allow us to create an alias for our content. So, instead of using "node/15" in our URL, we can use something more descriptive like "content/cool-seo-article".

After setting up Drupal on GoDaddy, I've found that this site is just WAY TOO SLOW with Drupal+GoDaddy. It's annoyingly slow. Previously, I just had a simple static site and it was fast, but that's not too surprising for a static site. I have just contacted GoDaddy about this and my guess is that I won't get any resolution. I looked at this article about the problem, and it talks about shared hosting on GoDaddy in general being slow.

I checked on my kristen.org site after some absence only to find a bunch of spammy comments in my Drupal comments approval queue. I've been slowly adding new modules to the site and trying to write about what I'm adding along the way. Well, I forgot to add in Captcha so I ended up with the spam. So for those that want to reduce spam on their site:

1) Download captcha module (or perhaps a harder to guess version like Riddler (Drupal 5 only)

2) Uncompress and install in sites/all/modules

OBJECTIVE

As of October 2008, I have enough contract work to last through 2008. I have been doing telecommuting contracts from Scotts Valley, CA, and starting in 2009 would like to find additional part-time contracts doing web/LAMP/Drupal programming, search engine optimization (SEO) and/or Java development. My preference is for contracts that allow for substantial telecommuting and/or are located within the Santa Cruz area.

SUMMARY

• 15 years experience in technical positions in academic, Fortune 100 and startup environments.

I have been a Drupal programmer since early 2004 and have used versions 4, 5 and 6. It has come a long way in the past 4 years and many things that had to be custom-coded in version 4 are now easily configured in version 6 with built-in core modules or popular third-party modules. But, having had to write many custom Drupal modules from scratch has aided in my understanding of how to use the new modules and how to modify them (via hooks) as needed.