I’m posting this here because I don’t want to forget it. I’ve used MySQL for almost 10 years, and I never picked up this tidbit of information. Knowing it long ago would have saved me some headaches.

If you’re setting up a MySQL connect string, if you use ‘localhost’, the driver will attempt to use the mysql.sock defined for your system. If you use ’127.0.0.1′ it uses the 3306 port that we’re all used to.

Here I was thinking that localhost:3306 would use the port.

This is particularly important on MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard because the mysql.sock file isn’t in the expected location. I was installing a dev version of Drupal to test my themes locally and I kept hitting this error

Failed to connect to your MySQL database server. MySQL reports the following message: No such file or directory.

Changing to 127.0.0.1 fixed it.

I’ve been setting up Drupal’s XML Sitemap Module and I ran into a problem with a non-obvious solution. When you initially install the module, it sets most content, particularly blog posts, to be excluded from the sitemap. I spent a while poking around Admin looking for a way to include it, since all I have is blog posts. I figured I’d be able to changed it in the module settings page, but while the ‘excluded’ status is listed there for each content-type, you can’t change it.

Some googling led me to a post pointing out that the include/exclude setting is on the configuration page for the content-type itself, namely blog-post. From there it’s an easy change.

I’m a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of SEO plugins for drupal. This list of modules is really only a start. I’ve got all the ‘required’ modules installed and a few of the others. It’ll be tiring to list all of them, but pathauto and SEO Friend are already very useful after only a few minutes of being installed.

I am by no means an SEO expert, but I’m learning a lot as I go forward. I don’t plan to get crazy with the dark arts of SEO, for that is a deep rabbit-hole. But it just makes sense to have the basics covered: page titles, meta tags, canonical urls, 301 redirects and a few other bits.

I only learned the word “micropreneur” recently. I don’t know if it was coined by Rob Walling, but he introduced me to it. It is a “business style” where the goal is sustainable long-term income, and little, if any hiring. The micropreneur usually runs one more more small websites that actually make money. The difference between that and the usual startup path is there is no exit strategy, no IPOs, VC funding, or crazy growth.

That’s exactly teh type of business I am hoping to build. I really enjoyed reading Rework, and I had been thinking along those lines. But I didn’t know there was a name for it until I stumbled across Start Small, Stay Small and a few of Rob’s blog posts.

That book has been very informative. It validated some of my initial decisions, and laid out a panoply of guidance that I would have otherwise been without. Very smart, practical stuff.

I’ve also joined the Micropreneur Academy which expands on the information in the book even further, and has a community of founders all doing the same thing together.

I’m getting ready to launch my “sales site” which is a simple one page web page that gives a bit of information about the product and lets people sign up to be notified when I launch. Since launch is still months away, I’ll have a web presence that I can point people to, and I’ll hopefully collect a good mailing list that I can leverage at launch time to get a nice bump in traffic. It also allows me to test various SEO and SEM strategies long before I’ve polished up the code. When I launch, all my SEO will be fully primed in Google. I would not have done it this way without Rob’s advice.

I’m almost done finalizing the name of my new product. Once that’s done, I’ll let you all know and link over to the sales site.