Red Leaf Media

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the first DrupalCamp Indy in downtown Indianapolis, and I had a blast. The morning started with a talk by Kevin Finney of Web Easy Media on Drupal and SEO. We had some discussion about Drupal's past, present and future as it pertains to SEO. Kevin also provided some ideas on how to "seduce" the search engines into thinking highly of your site. For the second session, I attended a session by Ray Stuart (also of Web Easy Media) on Aegir, a system that has recently been developed for site development, deployment, hosting, etc. Aegir seems to be an interesting solution for someone who's dealing with many sites at the same time. However, I'll have to study it on a local virtual server more thoroughly in order to determine how it might fit in my workflow. Having finished two sessions, it was time for lunch. Microsoft had sponsored an excellent looking lunch, but the line was crazy long. So, I stepped over to a local pub for a quick club sandwich. I had actually finished lunch and returned to the venue before the line was through.

The afternoon sessions were even more impressive to me. First, Andrew Kucharski from Promet Source gave a great session on how to analyze and improve your Drupal site's speed. He heavily emphasized the "front-end" components (e.g. less http requests, CDN use, etc.) rather than "back-end" components (e.g. Apache and MySQL optimization) for best return on investment. He suggested several really good tools related to speed, the best of which was Web Page Test. The next session was equally valuable and was taught by Matthew Connerton. He mainly focused on the Features module which has been developed primarily by Development Seed. It looks like a great way to save time on Drupal site building, and I will definitely be implementing it in the near future. I really appreciated Matthew's knowledge and presentation style. I look forward to keeping up with him in the future. The last session was by Neil Hastings (of TreeHouse Agency) on Drush-make. This was yet another way to save time in Drupal site building, but I think that it's a little bit beyond what I need at this point. All in all, the whole afternoon was a good learning experience on how to speed up both my Drupal development and my Drupal sites.

The whole event was well-done, especially for a first-time host city. There were many other sessions concurrent with those that I attended, and they all seemed just as interesting. It seemed as though the nearly 100 people in attendance held the same basic sentiments as me, and I look forward to future Drupalcamps!