Using Git to Manage Custom Themes on Aegir Hosted Sites
A some already know, I have chosen to start hosting Drupal installs for clients. At some point (hopefully soon), I'd like to open this service up to the public. But that's not what you came here to...
View ArticleDrupal 7 WYSIWYG - as a FEATURE
Every Drupal developer knows that there many configuration settings that are similar between the sites that they build, whether it's a personal preference or a trend among clients. And every developer...
View ArticleSay No to SOPA/PROTECT-IP
H.R. 3261 (Stop Online Piracy Act) and S. 968 (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) are absolutely bad for online freedom. I normal restrain my...
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Xerox WorkCentre 6015NI on Debian/Ubuntu
I haven't had a printer in my office in a long time. Ink was just too expensive because I'd print so little that the ink cartridges would dry out before I even got 10% of the way through them. And at...
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A Better Way of Deploying Drupal
About a year and a half ago, I came across a post by Miguel Jacq about deploying Drupal automatically with Jenkins. I had grown tired of the manual...
View ArticlePreinstalling Your SSH Key on a Rackspace Cloud Server
One big complaint I hear from people used to Amazon AWS, HP Cloud, and other providers that let you store keypairs in their dashboard is that Rackspace lacks such a feature. While that feature is...
View ArticleUpcoming Classes to Help Your Business Succeed Online
Once again this year, I'm instructing a few classes through Western Technology Center aimed at helping your succeed online. You're not expected to having any technical knowledge - just an ability to...
View ArticleInstalling Fabric on Debian Squeeze
This is really more of a note to myself. Unfortunately over time, I've been spoiled by Puppet and sometimes forget how to do things the manual way.A lot of the scripts that I use on various Jenkins...
View ArticleCentralizing Logs with Lumberjack, Logstash, and Elasticsearch
We've all done it. When we needed to find something in a log, we just did a cat or a tail and piped it to grep. Maybe we told grep to also show us X lines before and after what it found. That works...
View ArticleHandy One-Liner for a Comma-Separated List of Pingdom IPs
Do you use Pingdom to monitor your server's uptime? Do you also use a firewall management tool to make it easier to manage iptables or another firewall, but don't allow your server to respond to ping...
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SEO Blueprint for 2013
Searchmetrics has released its Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation 2013 Study. As usual, it's full of good information on what is worth the effort today in SEO.Here's an infographic summarizing it.
View ArticleGithub Keeps Changing Webhook IPs? Here's a one liner.
This will get the webhook IP/CIDR from the Github API and output them as a comma separated list for easy import into firewall configs. curl https://api.github.com/meta | sed -e's/[{}]/''/g' | awk -v...
View ArticleTime to Start Planning Your Upgrade from Drupal 6
Drupal 8 is currently slated for sometime Winter 2013 (which, to me, likely means early Q1 2014). Once D8 is released, Drupal 6 will no longer be supported.That means no bug fixes. No security updates....
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Must Have Drupal Module: Advanced Text Formatter
If you have a content manager that likes to use inline images in the Body field of a Drupal site, you might run into an issue where they want an image inserted at the beginning of the field but don't...
View ArticleOpenstack Marconi as a Queue Backend for Drupal
One of the coolest features that made it into Drupal 7 without much (if any) fanfare is the Queue API. Drupal's Queue API is a pluggable system that allows you to queue events for later processing....
View ArticleUsing Elasticsearch for Drupal 7 Search
We're big fans of Elasticsearch. It is significantly easier to deploy, manage, and scale than SOLR in our experience. Since we've already been using Elasticsearch for indexing and storing system logs,...
View ArticleWebform Options by Bundle
At one time or another, most Drupal developers have worked on a site with one or more Webforms that used a select list that pertained to some other entity on the site (such as a store location, law...
View ArticleHow We Test Drupal 7 Modules on Travis CI
If you've been working much in open source software recently - especially PHP - there's little doubt that you have likely heard of Travis CI. For those don't know about Travis CI, it's a free hosted...
View ArticleWhy You Should Be Using Nodeless-Masterless Puppet
We run Puppet throughout our deployments and are often asked why we don't run a Puppetmaster. Simply put, in configuration management decentralization wins.But wait! Configuration management is about...
View ArticleEnsuring Consistent Configuration Across Drupal 7 Environments
A common issue that many Drupal developers have is maintaining consistent configuration across environments. Quite often, a developer may run into an issue where something that was tested and confirmed...
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