Drupal 6.x Single User Blog
The blogging feature of Drupal is great if your building a community site. One of the things I have had taught to me is that, you should always do lots of research before committing to any form of content management system. This really should be done before your initial installation.
After getting Drupal up and running, I really began to understand the duplicate content issues that could arise. Still I often wonder if we should really that concerned about it. None of us likes to look into our Google Webmaster account and see that duplicate content warnings.
The issue I ran into, because I did not do my research was how to setup a single user blog with Drupal, but it was already to late. I now had blog/ and blogs/xxx. Had I read some of the information before this I would have probably chosen to follow the advice given and use a story page.
So now how to fix this issue, I had created with out starting all over? In the main navigation it was easy to fix the Blog tab and have it point to my blog. Robot.txt instructed to robots that /blog was denied but /blogs/ was allowed, tested this in the Google webmasters tools to be sure.
Ok so now there was two issues left to fix. The first was the breadcrumb, when on a blog post still had a link back to the blog, since it was in the robots.txt it could stay there. After thinking about it for awhile I decided to remove the breadcrumb trail, while they serve a purpose having the link back to the blog and not blogs/xxx. bothered me. Maybe someone will know where to fix this issue or one day I'll eventually find it.
Removing the breadcrumb from the Marinelli Theme was easy. On the page.tpl.php file I just commented out the print $breadcrumb with this done I really liked the page layout much better, again it's a matter of personal choice.
The last issue I needed to fix to make this appear as a drupal single user blog was the more link, located on the recent blog posts. This one took a little digging, I finally located what I was after in the blog module file blog.module located at the bottom of this module was this section in bold below.
$block['content'] .= theme('more_link', url('blog'), t('Read the latest blog entries.'));
By changing it to:
$block['content'] .= theme('more_link', url('blogs/glenn'), t('Read the latest blog entries.'));
I now had the link pointing to the correct location, hopefully eliminating some of the duplicate content issues. I'm sure that there are probably easier ways to accomplish this, yet this is working for me at least, and maybe it will help a few others. For now this appears to give me the single user Drupal blog I was after.
One last item, since I'm modifying a core drupal module I'll have to make a mental note of this modification each time I update Drupal.
There are several ways to take over your breadcrumbs
I made some notes about it a while back: http://agaricdesign.com/breadcrumb-control
Good work. Thanks for writing
Good work. Thanks for writing this up. One thing you may want to consider is how to 301 links that went to your old blog pages to your new ones. This will help you to rank well in Google if people link to the old pages address. I had a similar problem on my VB6 Source site and fixing all the duplicate content with 301 redirects helped a ton. Hope this helps you too feel free to email me if you have any questions about it.
Change content type
Might be easier/simpler to change the node type of your existing posts in the database from blog to story, disable the blog module, and use "create story" from now on.
I've not bothered to do this with my own blog, as I'm not particularly interested in search-driven users. My blog has a highly specific target that it reaches through several syndication channels.
I second this
Using the story content type, promoting appropriate nodes to the front or using a custom View, is a good way of achieving this without the blog module and breadcrumb hackery.
This was my first mistake also
I migrated a blog from WordPress to Drupal and thought "Yeah, Blog module is for blogs!" and realized later on down the road that content types could be used instead for a single user blog. I used the node convert module and, after thinking it through, converted all of my blog posts to another content type and disabled the blog module. Now my site works better and no longer has links to other blogs.
Thanks for giving me the inspiration to fix my mistake. The blog module is great for multiple users, but for one user it's a pain!
Yes, it would probably be a
Yes, it would probably be a good idea if the Blog module were renamed to something like Multi-user Blog or something - or removed from core altogether. You hear of this confusion time and time again.
I also can vouch for just using the Story content type. It's working great for me.
Great info...
Great info. Thanks for sharing!
try this to add no follow
try this to add no follow
'href' => "blog/$node->uid", array('rel' => 'nofollow'),