Drupal 7.x

I have been using Drupal for quite a while as a CMS and I love it.

I've recently come up with an idea for a new forum/blogging site-- and I am not too familiar with how the blog works. I will be doing studies, but I would like to know everyone's thoughts on the blog.

Nowadays, compressing CSS and JS files doesn't speed up the site much. Most of the page loading delay is often spent on waiting for yet another file to come. Aggregating CSS and JS into helps, but if you see google.com or yahoo.com source code, you'll see that they went for embedding their CSS and JS right into the page. It makes HTML bigger, but faster - just 1 file to load. I guess even including relatively small images right into HTML would speed up the site (though it won't work in IE6).

I am trying to find a user friendly way to do this:

1. Create 'Image' content type
2. Create Imagefield CCK field to 'Image'
3. Create a few 'Image' Nodes
4. Create a 'Story' Node and add an image to it already submitted via 'Image'

This is similar to how Wikipedia handles this. It has a central repository of images and allows users to create wiki articles and link to the image file.

I assume there might be an input filter that can handle this like

[node:345 size: 400x400 float:right]

How can I block User profiles (or any other content type) from being found via the search module.

Thanks

We are looking for multiple stores software, anywhere from 5 stores to 500 stores and beyond.
Each store needs to run independently from each other, but use the same database.

How do I post a story page and edit where the page goes (category, chapter, whatever), from word 2007?