General

Sometimes we get requests to update Drupal sites and get it done in less than 5 hours. If we take the Drupal update through the full fail-safe set of steps for Drupal updates we will never be able to complete updates in less than 5 hours on a site we don't maintain. For such sites when the cost of the site going down may not be too high for the site owner it might not be too big an issue if the update is run on a hit or miss approach. We normally do not recommend such an approach but this should work on most small sites without any issues.

Keeping the Drupal core and contributed modules up-to-date (at least on the security updates) is one of the essential steps for keeping a Drupal site safe and secure. Running updates of Drupal modules is usually a straightforward mechanism on a Drupal site that is done right. However what will you do if you do not know how things have been built? What will you do if some of the custom modules used are tied down to specific versions of some contributed module? What if there were custom changes on the site. Here is how you can run updates on a Drupal site almost completely safely.

When you want to move a Drupal site from one hosting server to another you have to ensure that the site works the same way on the new server as it used to work on the old server. There is no real fool proof way of doing this other than to meticulously document all the custom aspects associated with setting up the site and verifying it on the new server. The following is a checklist of information you have to collect before you move your Drupal site from one server to another. Checklist: Migrate from one server to another

We were testing our newly implemented modal popup for a login functionality. It was working pretty good in Firefox, Opera, and Chrome but not in IE8. When attempts to login by clicking on a login link the login modal was not appearing in IE8. Firebug said nothing, but jquery-1.7.2.min.js in IE showed the following error:

If you own a VPS or a dedicated server or a hosting server which allows you to have shell access then you can easily set up your own git server with as many users and as many repositories as can be stored in the space on your server. All you need to do this is a bit of system administration skills and a hosting server that allows you shell access. Read on to see how you can set up your own git server.

If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.

One of our clients sent us images they want to put in the website as pdf files. There were 100 files each containing a single image. Opening each of these in gimp and then saving it as pngs was a nightmare. For all such situations, ImageMagick is there for your rescue. With mogrify - a command utility available in the ImageMagick package, bulk converting all these pdf files to png was child's play.

OpenOffice Calc is surprisingly an excellent tool for creating wireframes. Wireframes can be created very easily in OpenOffice Calc using the standard shapes available from the drawing toolbar and also by merging cells in the sheet. Each sheet can be used to define a single wireframe and then a single spreadsheet document can contain all the wireframes for a given project. OpenOffice Calc also allows you to export the full set of wireframes as a pdf document with one page corresponding to each sheet in the document. Here are some tips to create good wireframes using OpenOffice Calc.

Most linux users are aware of the basic Linux terminal commands such as cd, ls, rm, rmdir, mkdir etc. Now let us take a look at some other commands which will help you make the best of the linux shell/terminal.

XHTML Validation serves the purpose of rechecking our site to see if it follows the W3C standards. It not only ensures quality, but also teaches us good coding practices and thereby eases maintenance. Validating one's code before taking it live serves as a sign of good professionalism in a coder's career. Common errors found during XHTML validation are listed below: 1. Not closing empty tags. Empty tags are tags that do not contain any content.

On one of the maintenance projects we got we came across a page that used to take around 11 seconds to load. The page was a views listing for users. We were able to speed up the page load times from around 11 seconds to under 3 seconds by taking out just the distinct option used in the view. The following was the select query that was originally generated from the view with the time logged by views in the preview panel.

In every operating system, there are a lot of tasks that need to be scheduled to run at a particular time - some, very often (as in, every 5 minutes), and some, less (like, once every month). For a quick example, you might want to run a temporary files deletion operation at midnight each day - this is where you need to write a cron job.Crontab and Cron jobs are Linux’s version of a complete job scheduling system.Let us see these in detail.