Onyxbits

Do you know what's funny about the movie "Plan 9 from outer space"? It's so bad that you wouldn't want to pay money for it and therefore nobody would try to sell it to you anymore. Yet, you just have to see it. Good news is, the movie is, like many others of that era, in the public domain now. Bad news are that you need to download it and are likely to end up with something that will play fine on your PC, but not necessarily on a DVD player.

Simmering problems are the worst and one that has been irking me for quite some time now is the utter uselessness of the "popular/today" view which comes with the Views module. Judging by it's name, you'd suspect it to reset the daily counter on midnight. Surprise! It doesn't. Worse yet, the time by which the counter gets reset advances constantly. In my case, one hour per day.

Where you ever hit by the social media? Making it to the frontpage of some large social network and getting thousands of extra visits in just a few hours is probably every bloggers dream... At least until it actually happens and the sudden traffic burst turns into a nightmare as the webserver grinds down to a halt.

In case you ever experienced this, or want to prepare for such a thing happening, I put together a few tips that should help to prevent the worst on standard LAMP type root servers.

Let's face it, Drupal's input formats are currently a mess. Directly after installation, the CMS offers "Filtered HTML" and "Full HTML", with "Filtered HTML" being the default. In theory, this works fine. Trusted users can use the entire set of tags, while untrusted users are limited to a stripped down version.

Ok, I have been struggling with version-control systems lately. More precisely with switching from svn to git. Subversion really was a pain in the butt. I spent more time on fixing my repositories and worrying about not introducing inconsistencies again, than on actual software development. This added to the horrible workflow of branching and merging, as well as the security nightmare of granting repository access to others, svn just turned out to be totally unsuited for my needs.

When blogging, you usually publish loose thoughts. Generally, ideas, that just came to mind and seemed interesting enough to write about at that time.
Blogging is great in the sense, that you do not need to worry a lot about structuring your content.

Let's start this with a use case. Suppose you have a client, owning an insurance company, consisting of several more or less independent departments. Let's say car insurance, life insurance, health insurance and so on. Now, that client needs a website for his intranet, so employees can efficiently communicate with each other. One important aspect of office communication is collaboration in teams. For example, the life insurance team should be able to work out a plan for a new life insurance policy without the health insurance people snooping around in their work.

There seems to be an obscure bug somewhere either in Drupal itself or in one of the modules. I haven't been able to pinpoint it's location yet, but it struck me twice already and damage repair can be utmost time consuming, especially if you do not know what you are looking for. So I guess, I'll write a how-to for it.