System Administration

Drupal 10 and the socPub Family of Websites

During the past seven days I've been upgrading our websites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. There are four of them which includes socPub, CMS Report, INFOTECH Pub, and After Work Pub. While one is never quite done with the work, we're quickly moving from the upgrade back to the maintenance phase of these website. As the dust settles down it will soon be time to start focusing on the content and presence of these websites.

Moving to Drupal 10 in November

With support for Drupal 9 fast coming to a close, we'll be upgrading our various websites to Drupal 10 in the month of November. In April 2006, I chose Drupal to build this site, originally known only as CMS Report, with a beta version of Drupal 4.7.  Along the way, except for a detour in the 2010s when we relied on the Agility CMS for a few years, Drupal has been our content management system of choice.

New Research Suggests Media and Publishing Businesses Have The Best Performing Websites

Media and publishing companies have the best performing websites according to new analysis of all FTSE 100 and 250 homepages by an expert team at Contensis

Travel, hospitality and leisure and retail and grocery; industries which existentially rely on their online presence, failed to make it into the top half of the table. 

socPub: Relaunching CMS Report and having fun at the After Work Pub

It make take awhile but when I make a mistake I will eventually admit and correct the error of my ways. Half a decade ago, I turned my back on supporting niche websites and focused all my effort in creating a new multi-topic website which you now know as socPub. As counter-intuitive that it sounds, the more diverse and interesting topics we published under this website, our number of loyal visitors to the website decreased in numbers. I found this analysis to be alarming and discouraging.

End of Life for Drupal 8

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

New Study Reveals Positive Impact of Page Speed on Google Rankings

San Mateo, May 16, 2019 - Websites that rank higher on Google tend to load faster and provide a smoother user experience on mobile according to a new Searchmetrics study conducted using Google’s open-source website auditing tool, Google Lighthouse[1]. And higher ranking sites in general are more likely to use modern web technologies such as next-generation image formats and the newer, faster HTTP/2 web protocol.  

socPub in the Slow Lane

I'm a one-person show when it comes to managing, editing, and maintaining the content found at socPub. A year and a half a ago, there was a lot of unknowns when I rebranded CMS Report into socPub. Today, I'm happy to report that the number of readers that visit the site daily have stabilized. When we receive a unique and exceptional article, almost immediately the published article becomes popular and attracts a number of new visitors to the site.

WordPress plugins and how they have been affecting your website performance

WordPress is currently the leader of all CMS platforms with about 30% market share. Millions of websites now run on WordPress. This open-source platform is making the world of web design a better place for everyone. This builder has the power to take care of every user's need and the visitors to each website. It has the simplest backend management and frontend customization options among all open source and closed source CMSs. It is the ease of customization and the simplicity that drives website developers towards WordPress indiscriminately. If you are planning to use WordPress for building your business website, you should brace yourself for the host of features and plugins that the platform offers.

Study: Faster web pages already rank higher in mobile searches – even before Google’s “Speed Update”

San Mateo, June 28, 2018 - Ahead of the rollout of Google’s mobile “Speed Update” in July 2018, a new study by Searchmetrics suggests that marketers should take note that faster-loading pages already are deciding winners over losers in mobile searches. The search results appearing in Google positions one to five load significantly faster than those lower down, with almost a third (32%) loading within one second. And pages using Google’s faster loading Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)[1] appear in the first search results page for around 61% of searches.