Rainer Feike techblog

I recently wanted to check my entries in dmoz and found some of my sites were kicked out. Why did they do this? Didn’t get any explanation for sure. They did some work like reorganizing the structure - or whatever. Well, I’m a little bit angry currently - but it doesn’t make sense anyway anymore (except for backlinks - is dmoz a huge link-farm?).

Do you know a single person that uses a directory to browse the internet? Don’t think so.. but if yes - she will not use dmoz more then two times. In the “rich subject tree” you’re everytime a dozen clicks away from your goal - and the choice is subject to ‘editors’, and what’s the relation to AOL? That’s exactly not what the democratic web2.0 is for.

Google claims a few hours to add an interesting new site to its index - the dmoz wants some weeks or months. So maybe we miss some important happening when using dmoz?

Thanks a lot to all the hundreds of thousands of editors that were building the biggest directory of the universe - I am afraid it’s out-dated now - you can not take the challenge of the rapidly growing web anymore.

Yahoo already gave up - when will dmoz power off?

Last weeks I was working on a new Drupal driven company site. This time I wanted to create my theme from scratch (calles “ANewCompany”) and wanted to use heavy taxonomy for cross linking.
The site is on air now and promises professional web2.0 programming (German).

On the site I use following modules:

Blog, Book, Forum, Poll - for content creation
Comment, Contact - for visitor interaction
Drupal - for site registry
Locale - for string translation and adjustment
Menu, Path - for site navigation
Taxonomy - for cross linking and navigation
Search - for site wide full text search
Statistics - for access statistics
Akismet - for spam protection
Comment mail - for admin notifications
Service links - for social network linking
TinyMCE - as wysiwyg editor
Views - for some data mining and block representation
Fivestar, Voting API - for content voting

I developed a new page.tpl.php template where I’ve foreseen the regions as follows

  function ANewCompany_regions() {
      return array(
	  'header' => t ('header'),
          'content_top' => t('content top'),
          'content' => t('content'),
          'sidebar_left' => t('sidebar left'),
          'sidebar_right' => t('sidebar right'),
          'content_bottom' => t('content bottom'),
          'footer' => t('footer'),
          'super_footer' => t('super footer')
      );
  }

For the sidebars I use a table-less floating CSS layer concept for reasons i.e. stated here.
In my template.php file I overwrite theme_links for primary_links (to achieve rounded tabs as primary navigation) and the book navigation theme_book_navigation($node) to make it more nice. Special theming for blog and book content is done by node-blog.tpl.php and node-book.tpl.php files.

Next days I will working on a generalization of the theme to contribute it to the drupal theme repository.