Oh man has it been a crazy couple of months. I've been meaning to write here more but I always find an excuse or something comes up that prevents me from getting to new content.

This doesn't sit well with readers I know, but if you are at all interested in this blog and it's content, then you are right in the thick of things just like myself. You also know how hectic it is, trying to build a legitimate online business that people can trust and will come back to visit regularly.

Fortunately for me I receive a ton of new traffic from the search engines for my posts I have already created which is the best kind of traffic there is, but it only makes it more of a challenge to continue creating relevant organic search content.

I'm just throwing this out there but currently at the time of this post I'm receiving 53% organic search traffic which has been as high as 63% and no lower than 50% since launching this website. 

I would like to start off by thanking you for reading, and I hope I can provide you with something valuable that you can use to further your online ventures. With that being said I'm going to enlighten you as to exactly what I've been up to lately.

Okay so the last 5 or so months have consisted of working full time managing a wireless company retail store with 4 employees until Monday, February 9, 2009 at which time I will be unemployed yet again from corporate America.

Owners of this company decided they wanted out of the business and that's that. No more job for me and countless other employees who were blindsided by the owners and upper management by this sudden and devastating business decision.  In todays economy this is terrible business practice and ethics with such a tough job market and unemployment lines growing every day more warning would have been a lot less of a burden on every employee at any of their 20 locations in Utah and Colorado.

During that time I have been working on building a Drupal web design service which hasn't gone all that well(p.s. if you're having a website built make sure you have all of the content before you employ the services of a web designer, and no we can't just build the site with template text!!) but will straighten itself out as soon as I get the remaining content from one of my clients.

I have also been working on my own iPhone application that you can check out via http://iSEOapp.com for more info. Along with working on an application for the iPhone I've been facilitating several other iPhone development projects for various clients who are very creative with their imaginations which is producing some awesome application concepts for all different types of categories.

The fun doesn't stop there with all of my Drupal focused work, I've taken some time to look into other CMS platforms that are available via the open-source communities spreading throughout the web just to see what is there and to keep up on technologies. 

I began my adventures in CMS platforms 4 years ago when I registered my very first domain name with Hostgator. With Hostgator hosting plans the control panel consists of cPanel which is a highly recognized mainstream admin panel for websites. With cPanel you also get Fantastico which is exactly that, FANTASTIC! Fantastico is an add-on to cPanel that includes a number of open-source  projects available with the click of a mouse. If you would like to try a free 30 day trial hosting and check out cPanel, please contact me via the contact form, I offer regular and managed Drupal hosting.(oh yeah I forgot to add that to the above list of distraction/jobs)

I've been trying to get involved in the Drupal community by purchasing Drupal focus domain names, and working to build online community websites that serve as a training platform for Drupal. The three domain names that I purchased are the following:

http://DrupalOnlineTraining.com - An online resource featuring available content throughout the web in one easy to use resource. Also provide a place for developers to showcase their art by providing instruction on building powerful Drupal based websites.

http://DrupalTrainingLive.com  - This website I have big plans for with regards to offering live training to the Drupal community. My goal would be a place for worldwide Drupal events can host their training for those that are not able to make it but would pay a fee to have access to not only the live training but also archived training's.

http://DrupalVideoTraining.com - For developers who are inclined to create products that can be purchased as a series will find this site to be an ideal launch pad into a great training opportunity, and additional income for their efforts by providing videos to those interested.

As the saying goes it takes money to build something, and although the community is vast and very contributing these projects are a little out of reach for love work. I'm hoping that with the hopeful success of iSEO I can have some additional funds to better ensure the success of these sites.

One of my various other projects include my managed Drupal hosting which allows a client to have a Drupal site maintained by my company. What that entails is regular update, and version checking to ensure the site is alway using the latest versions of Drupal Core, modules, and themes which is a job in and of its self if you're not skilled.

I have recently decided to venture outside of Drupal and look at a couple of different platforms available to the world via open-source license agreement. Which allows one to use, manipulate, and build upon existing modules or build your own modules, themes, etc. Drupal is I believe the best available multi-functional platform that is ready for anything you want to attempt.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to building on Drupal and using it for the robust platform that it is. There is somewhat of a learning curve when you're talking about Drupal but for someone who has never worked with PHP, MySQL, CSS, XML, etc, Drupal will bring you up to speed with all of them. All of these languages are industry standards and compliance driven so you can take the skills you learn and utilize them in many other aspects of platform based web sites.

More on a couple of other CMS platforms that I recently took a look at, one of which I'm currently using for http://iSEOapp.com.

So the first one I'm going to mention is Silver Stripe available at SilverStripe.org and is a nice little piece of CMS fun Although I found it a bit confusing I'm not done with it just yet, and plan on playing around a bit more.

The second would be Concrete5.org which is the CMS I choose to play with for iSEOapp.com. It has a great dashboard, and content creation is a breeze. Page blocks and layout is similar to a Blogger type interface with the click and drag content features. The community is a little confusing and I'm finding myself having to search a bit for answers but it's an active community to say the least. I was able to find a great theme of which I hack away at and played with the CSS a bit which is what you see now.

I plan on posting a bit more about my case study for launching iPhone Applications, and please feel free to visit the sites listed above at any time. Some are pretty scary, other's have nil but good intentions and and unwavering owner that will get them done eventually.

Sincerely,

Joshua Needham