Drupal 6.x

Hooray! I finally opened my ScenePainter website up for the public, did some minor SEO for it and after only about a week or two, my most diligent user is a russian spambot. It visits me about once every half an hour and tries to publish it's crap in a "head against the wall fashion": It first tries to log in, then attempts to add a new node eleven(!) times, but fails on several required fields.

I hereby proclaim that I now officially hate Twitter. The usability of that microblogging "service" is absurd to put it mildly. It's beyond me, why people would even want to use it, let alone, feel the need to tell the world about when they get up, eat dinner, and go to bed again. Making heads or tail out of individual tweets, without knowing their context, is a horse of a different color altogether. But does that mean that Drupal's twitter module (v6x-3.0-beta3) has to be equally braindead in design!?

Seems like I allowed my AdSense account to grow into a mess over the last year. After experimenting with banner placement and different ad units, click tracking became nearly impossible. So, time to clean it up a bit.

I recently had this brief and very frustrating discussion about whether or not you should advice prospective webmasters to go with a shared hosting plan instead of a virtual private server in order to host their Drupal website. The main argument against a VPS was that a server in untrained hands is an easy target for hackers, whereas a shared hosting plan comes with a system administrator who takes care of things like security patches.

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.

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.

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.