drupal
Everything Old is New Again
It's time for my quarterly blogging drive, and to start, here's some information on my ever-increasing need to try out cool web technologies.
Server Migration
My previous server was a VPS with 1 GB RAM for an obscenely low price from Serve By Design. I'm not linking to them, because I wouldn't recommend them, as you'll see. For the money, I didn't expect them to stay around forever, and I was right. At the end of September, I got an email saying that they had to immediately cease all hosting and that I had 10 days to move my VPS. Not great, but I can deal with that.
I've been doing some work with Rackspace's cloud products recently for work, so I decided to move to a Cloud Server VPS running CentOS. I'm quite impressed with the Rackspace Cloud thus far, they have a robust backup / cloning system, and the plans are plenty cheap so long as your data transfer isn't too high. Since I'm using SimpleCDN to handle all static content for my Drupal 6 sites, there's really nothing to worry about on the data transfer front.
Need for Speed
I've been doing some pretty exciting things recently with website performance. I always disliked doing IT work in the past, but the challenge of setting a server up to be able to withstand crushing traffic is now quite intriguing to me.
To wit, here's a funny moment from a recent experiment. I was using incrond to run a script to minify some JavaScript whenever Drupal created a new JS file. Unfortunately, my script also created a new JS file (a backup, unminified copy,) and the protection I put into place wasn't quite working correctly. I think the image below speaks for itself.
Why I Hate Drupal: Friday the 13th Edition
Now that I'm back from my month-long blog hiatus and from DrupalCon DC 2009, I thought I'd throw up a little post in the same vein as walkah's brilliant Why I Hate Drupal talk.
A friend was building a Drupal site and asked me what I thought the best way to prepopulate a lot of HTML into a node body field was for a newsletter. Now, she's using Simplenews and Simplenews template isn't yet out for Drupal 6, but that's no problem. In the past, on sites like YPOGP.org, I implemented the newsletter by using a little module called nodeformtemplate to fill in the node body with a full HTML newsletter, and letting the user type in the extra HTML they needed. That module makes it easy, right?
Back to Blogging
Welcome to the new (and completely empty) Grenade Sandwich. My name is Steven Merrill, a classical singer and technologist, and I'll be your host.
The title of this site comes from a season finale of The Shield, and I think you'll understand what I'm talking about if you're a fan of the show.