Web design

Anyone who runs a site/server for very long will likely find out about the gruesome underbelly of the online work - spammers. They come in many shapes and sizes (most are bots), and with different purposes each, but they each have this in common - they hurt your site/server and it's available resources.

Below are some things to look out for and some methods to take care of one particular type of spam, referrer spam, which can cripple a site/server in no time. With enough referrer spam you'll have what amounts to a denial of service attack (e.g., so many junk requests that the server can't even tend to the real ones).

Example of how serious this can be
Recently one of the sites we host had a big traffic day thanks to being front paged at Fark.com and Foobies.com. 18,000+ unique visitors in 18 hours. Suffice it to say that put quite a load on the shared environment they were hosted in. Well, guess what - the (unrelated) spam attack the site received a few days later actually created more than twice the load on the server that the huge amounts of legitmate traffic did!

Identifying the problem
The first step in fixing a problem is, of course, to know you have one! Referrer spam can be tricky because without knowing where to look you may never realize what is happening in the dark corners of your webserver - you'll just see the symptoms. (a slow site or one that is down completely)

Recently we had the pleasure of developing a very cool intranet for a group associated with the United Nations. They desired an online space within which they can privately share articles, comments, and files with each other.

Our mission was to make a site that would:

• Not let anonymous users view any content
• Enable varying levels of viewing, adding, and editing rights across differing authenticated user roles - on a per page/node basis
• Enable different/custom menu configurations based upon user role
• Redirect users after a successful login attempt to a front page which is unique to user role

If you have never used Drupal before you may not know that the above functionality is not available out-of-the-box. However, with a little research we found some contributed modules which helped us to achieve a totally customizable intranet:

• front page
• login destination
• menu per role
• nodeaccess

One of the greatest things about the Drupal CMS is that it can support *any* look and feel you want it to in a just click of a button. Or at least it can once you have the theme you want designed and "Drupalized".

Themes/designs are a very unique part of a web site, because they they simulataneously are "just" a wrapper for the content on your site - while at the same time being *the* main element which keeps your site from just being a bunch of text splattered on a page (screenshot of this page without an active theme).

So, the visual design of your site is one thing in itself, but it's only a beginning, and in a proper site construction a theme should start out literally as a 'pretty picture', mocked up in Photoshop for easy experimentation/changes.

What happens after this stage in theme development is an entirely different case altogether, because now we're moving from a 'pretty picture' to working code, which will affect browser compatibly (do Internet Explorer 7 users see your page as a blob?), download speed, and usability (does the link to the contact page not work for Firefox users?).

The coding stage is where expertise and testing become necessary in order to keep a your design from becoming a nightmare in terms of usability, compatibility, and flexibility.

In addition to the U.S. and international markets which HigherVisibility serves, we also have a non-virtual home in the Sacramento area, which gives us and our clients more opportunities for the kind of personal face time that isn't always an option when communicating thousands of miles away.

So, if you're in the Sacramento area and are looking for world class web design, online community building, blogging tools, or intranet development - all done with the best open source tools available contact us.

This article is provided for do-it-yourself'ers who would like to customize their site's theme colors, (which will be a good warm-up for doing other things with your theme, btw). With this information and a some patience it's should not be too hard to change your template's colors around yourself, so take heart, and quit your shakin' already!

To change theme colors, the file you'll usually want to edit is called "styles.css" and it can normally be found inside your selected theme's folder. Every great once in a while you may also need to edit "drupal.css" which is located in the "misc" folder of your root Drupal directory, but most of the time this is not the case.

So now let's get editing:

If you have the theme_editor.module installed you can just edit the styles.css file inside your browser window, but it may be a lot easier to see and/or search and replace things if you copy and paste the contents of " style.css" into a proper text editor like like NoteTab Light for instance ( http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php ). It is VERY important NOT to use a rich-text application like Microsoft Word or Wordpad for editing because those programs will introduce invisible characters which can screw up the processing of your code! Believe it or not, the otherwise enemic "Notepad" which comes with windows CAN be used for editing code, since it is plain-text based and not rich-text.