In the last few years, the term “cloud computing” has become the ubiquitous new buzz-word to toss around when talking about flexible, scalable hosting solutions. Unfortunately, as often happens when a new concept is introduced to a large market, it is often misunderstood; the benefits and drawbacks are misrepresented (intentionally or not). The original concept …
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The dreaded “MySQL has gone away” error
In environments where there are many databases running on the same machine (ex. shared hosting), or in high traffic environments (ex. enterprise sites) it is a common problem that unterminated connections to the database linger around indefinitely until MySQL starts spitting out the “Too many connections” error. The fix for this is decrease the wait_timeout …
Read more »The Web Development Process for Newbies
Are you a Communications Director or Campaign Manager who has just been asked to take care of getting your organization a new website? Never done this before and not sure why it’s part of your job? You’re not alone! At least once each week I talk to someone in your position who seems lost and …
Read more »On Earth Day, Help the Climate Movement (& Advomatic) Win a Webby Award!
UPDATE 4.29.10:We’re neck and neck for first place. Every vote counts! Please take 5 minutes and help the climate movement get more attention! Today is the last day to vote! We recently received the fantastic news that one of our recent projects, TckTckTck.org, is nominated for Best Activism website in the Webby Awards. And we …
Read more »A lesson in the usefulness of CSS sprite generators
The basic premise of a sprite image is to consolidate your site’s graphics into one (or more) master image file. Then, with the magic of CSS’s background-position property, you can shift the master sprite image around and only reveal the parts you want. Like a window. Some might even say like a Sliding Door. What …
Read more »Theming the User Login Block
Don’t want people to look at your site and immediately know it is Drupal? Theme your user login block! While it isn’t always your top priority, customizing the look and feel of the login form helps maintain the integrity of a custom design. In this post, I’ll get you started using both CSS and PHP …
Read more »Quick and easy Congressional District lookups for your CiviCRM contacts
By definition CiviCRM is used by many organizations in the political sphere. For those organizations working in the US one useful metric to have on your contacts is their congressional district. Up until now this has usually been accomplished with either custom code, or exporting your contacts, sending them through a bulk lookup tool, and …
Read more »Media Sprint in NYC a Success!
On October 23-24, Jonathan and I met with some of the top Drupal Media developers in NYC for a code sprint. The purpose of the sprint was to bring to fruition the vision of the Media module for Drupal 7, which will act as a unified media file browser for the Internet, allowing editors to …
Read more »Drupal Maintainability III – Self Documentation
It’s been a while since I’ve done an article in the Maintainability series, but that’s how the web business goes – alternating between insane activity and manageable momentum. This time we’re talking about writing self-documenting code. For those of you who write code, be it theming, CSS, module development, or anything else I think self-documenting …
Read more »TckTckTck
TckTckTck is a GCCA campaign calling for a new fair, strong, binding, and international climate change treaty. The Global Campaign for Climate Action recently formed to build a global groundswell for a strong climate deal in Copenhagen this December. GCCA is a collaboration of International NGOs inspired by the success of the Make Poverty History …
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