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Blogspot and blogger are the two faces of the same coin. Blogger was known as Blogspot but when Google bought it, people started calling the site Blogger. Google hasn’t destroyed Blogspot. Sites that are hosted on it are identified by the following domain name: site_name.blogspot.com Is BlogSpot safe? As Google owns Blogger, it is a much safer website than a self-hosted WP blog. If you enable two-factor authentication, it will be impossible for a hacker to take over your site because blogger asks users to enter their Gmail password to log into their profile. All websites powered by Google are secure. Have you ever heard that Gmail or Google got hacked? ...

Google penalizes spammy EMD sites, but do you know that Exact match domain names can outrank an authority site for a specific keyword? If you don’t know this, you are probably a newbie or an immature SEO professional. Here are the three important things that you should know as a Sear Engine Optimization professional. EMD domains rank I can give 10 good examples that exact match domain names rank high for the keywords. Google starts ranking EMD sites only after a certain time period. The sites using EMD have 100s of polished articles with an average content length of 500 words. ...

Freelance writing and blogging are two of the most preferred options for making money online by working from home. If you are planning to begin your career as an FW or a blogger, go through the below pros/cons of these two career options. Pros of Freelance Writing Better reputation: If authority sites like Huffington post, BGR, TechCrunch are publishing your articles, 1000s of people might know you. You are likely to have a good fan following. ...

In an earlier post, I outlined the basics of dependency injection and talked a little bit about the Drupal 8 service container and how we can use this in our code. Day 16 of Drupal Activity Cards provides a task for us to implement dependency injection in one of the Drupal 8 Example modules. The examples module is a great resource for developers getting started in Drupal coding. The modules included gives us basic functionality that provides easy to follow starting points for a number of different needs. For our dependency injection example we are going to look at page_example, a simple module for generating a Drupal 8 page via a controller. A function called simple() returns a basic page. We are going to extend this function to provide a log entry every time a use visits this page. ...

I own a laptop which has a dedicated graphics card. I am a developer who prefers using Linux OS. I’ve tried 3 distros of Linux, Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSuse. No matter what version of Linux I use, the OS fails to recognize the AMD graphics card in my laptop and the WiFi connection always drops. I fixed the WiFi issue by upgrading the driver but the GPU installation always fails. Hence, I decided to give up using Linux and stick with Windows 10 OS for development tasks. ...

Logging is very important in any production site because we don’t have the same ability to debug code that we have in our development environments. Drupal 7 had a very robust logging system called watchdog(), which has been replaced by logger in Drupal 8. This post summarizes a basic use case for logging in Drupal 8 continuing the Drupal 8 Activity Cards series on Day 13. Amber Matz breaks down logging in Drupal 8 concisely in How to Log Messages in Drupal 8. In her article, she breaks down the code needed to implement logger and provides solid explanations. The examples provided involve procedural coding in the .module file as does the example I provide in this article. If you are writing controllers or forms that extend ControllerBase or FormBase then it would be better to use the service container to inject logger into your code. ...

Drupal 8 has a new theme engine, however many of the concepts we are familiar with in Drupal 7 are still in place in this new version. Themes still have the same ability to overwrite various templates within core, only now instead of modifying .tpl.php files, you will be creating Twig files in their place. Theme functions are still available to use, however they are now kept in the .theme file instead of template.php. Other changes worthy of exploring in more depth are briefly summarized below. ...

Drupal 8 has seen a lot of improvements for content entities and with the new Drupal console, setting up a content entity has been made a lot easier with the addition of boilerplate code generation. Day 11 of the Drupal 8 Activity Card set focuses on content entities, how they can be setup in Drupal 8, how we might add our own custom fields to the boilerplate code provided, and how this is managed within the Drupal 8 administration system. ...

Two of the most commonly used terms by bloggers and webmasters are backlinks and content. A site must have both else it will not rank in first seven pages of world’s busiest and largest search engine, Google. Backlinks aka inbound links are the most important criteria Google considers for ranking content of a website in their pages. One can easily prove this. Search for a product in Google. Popular sites with 1000s of backlinks will occupy first few pages. ...

I have struggled with properly optimizing my local environment in terms of enabling debugging and disabling cache for a while. There isn’t that many steps you need to cover in order to have a proper working development environment. After reviewing Day 10 I completed setting up my environment the correct way and have outlined this in the following sections. Step 1 Enable settings.local.php Copy and Rename /sites/settings.example.local.php -> /sites/default/settings.local.php Uncomment the following lines in your settings.php file: # if (file_exists(__DIR__ . '/settings.local.php')) { # include __DIR__ . '/settings.local.php'; # } Step 2 Disable Cache Services In your sites/default/settings.local.php file, uncomment the following: # $settings['cache']['bins']['render'] = 'cache.backend.null'; Rebuild your site configuration by visiting yoursite.local/rebuild.php Step 3 Disable Twig Cache and Enable Debugging Add the following lines to your /sites/development-services.yml (Refer to /sites/default/default-services.yml for all options) parameters: twig.config: debug: true auto_reload: true cache: false Clear Cache and then verify Twig debugging has been enabled by refreshing your Drupal 8 homepage. Review your source code and you should see something similar to: <!-- THEME DEBUG -->; <!-- THEME HOOK: 'html' -->; <!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS: * html--front.html.twig * html--.html.twig x html.html.twig -->; Twig debugging gives a lot of helpful information scattered throughout your source code in the form of comments. ...