Onyxbits

I have been playing with the Boost module a bit today. Boost is a nifty caching module that can vastly increase your website's performance when most of your visitors are anonymous users. So, how does Boost work? Basically, whenever an anonymous user requests a page, that page is not only delivered to the user, but also stored in a file. When a second anonymous user requests the same page again (within a given time), the webserver does not even bother to boot Drupal, but will just deliver the cached file instead.

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 made svn totally unsuitable 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.