returncontrol

When something’s wrong with your Web site, you want it fixed ASAP. But did you know that the way you report a bug to your developer(s) could actually slow things down and ultimately waste your organization’s money?

Check out The Four Types of Email Programmers Receive and see if you’ve ever sent a message like that. (Don’t worry, we all have at one point — but now you know better, right? ;)

Still not sure if building your Web site with Drupal is the right choice?  Consider this: Drupal won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.  Drupal had previously won the 2007 and 2008 Best Overall Open Source CMS Award.

I’m a little late in posting this (ok, a lot late), but the thousands of people who contribute to Drupal in so many ways all have my respect, congratulations, and support.

How do you build a modern news Web site that gives editors the tools they needs to serve San Francisco with in-depth reporting on important local issues — all without spending millions of dollars? You use Drupal.

That’s exactly what the nonprofit news organization SF Public Press did when it built SFPublicPress.org.

Although the startup focuses on the stories that other news organizations aren’t covering, it still has to compete for the attention of today’s tech-savvy readers who have many options for receiving news.

To do that, SFPublicPress.org offers much more than news articles on the Web. Among other things, the site features:

• audio and video to help convey what text can’t;
• an interactive media gallery that gives readers new ways to dive into stories;
• easily-accessible bio pages for reporters and editors so it’s clear who is behind each story;
• RSS feeds to keep readers informed as soon as news hits the site.

With all these features and more, it’s hard to believe that building the site took fewer than 60 development hours. (It’s hard to believe even for me — and I built it!)  But that’s the power of the Drupal content management system, and that’s why I recommend it as the platform for many of my clients’ sites.

How We Did It

Analysis: When SF Public Press was formed in 2008, originally as The Public Press, the staff launched a blog-style Web site on Drupal 5. By the time I met with them in Spring 2009, they had expanded their coverage and were ready to move away from the blog format.  They also wanted to add multimedia features so they could tell stories with more than just text. Read more »

Big news: The US government has relaunched Whitehouse.gov, its flagshipship Web site, on the Drupal content management system! This is a testament to Drupal’s stability, low-cost of ownership, and community-oriented DNA.

To read more, see Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s post on the subject:
http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal

And see also the writeup at techPresident.com:
http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal

With more than a decade of unbiased reviews of digital cameras under its belt, the Digital Camera Resource Page decided it was time to ugrade the underlying technology used to serve the reviews and move them to a multi-page format.  The new format helps split the in-depth reviews into more manageable chunks for the reader and provides additional ad inventory for the publisher.  Plus, the new content management system decreases the time it takes to publish a review and gallery.

The system was built on Drupal, which will make future expansion a snap. It uses multiple layers of caching to limit the load on the server and ensure users continue to get the fast page loads they’re used to.  It fits into the existing site architecture, some of which doesn’t use Drupal.  And it was deployed onto the active site with only minutes of total downtime.

Ensuring that old URLs continued to work was a challenge, but not insurmountable. Most of the system was built using contributed Drupal modules.  The majority of the custom code that was written was for the theme.  All in all, this is a great example of Drupal’s content management capabilities on a high traffic site.

(PS: If you need a digital camera, the Digital Camera Resource Page is the first place you should look!)

I’m happy to announce that Moon Travel Guides has just relaunched their site.  I worked on the project with Jason Salter and Eric Leland of FivePaths, an excellent Drupal consulting firm.  Check it out!

Amazon has agreed to refund the $175 fee I paid to attend its Amazon Web Services Developer Bootcamp in December.  I didn’t feel the bootcamp quite lived up to what it promised.  A marketing manager for Amazon AWS says the organization has received some “valuable feedback” and that they “will be making changes to improve the training and provide additional levels of training.”

More in-depth training that goes under the hood of an actual application would be great.  And if anyone attends an AWS bootcamp in the meantime, I’d love to hear how it went.

I’m attending the Amazon AWS Developer Bootcamp today in Silicon Valley, to learn how to use Amazon’s “cloud computing” services like Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), and Simple Storage Service (S3), for lowering Web hosting and infrastucture costs.  Unfortunately, we’re off to a slow start.

Nearly three hours into the class, we’re still on introductory slides and there’s confusion among attendees about how Elastic Block Storage works.  Also, the network here has slowed to a crawl so even the presenter’s online examples are being impacted.  Usually, at conferences, I forgive the inevitable network issues that arise when a roomful of developers go online at once.  But when you charge for a class focused on Web-based technologies, I think it’s a requirement to be prepared to handle the traffic.

Still, I’m hoping things pick up after lunch and that we actually into the examples.  The goal is to get under the hood of a video sharing application that runs off EC2, S3, and other Amazon Web services. Fingers crossed.

Update: We got a little further after lunch, and finally got a little more hands-on with some of the tools available for administering EC2 and S3.  So we practiced launching Linux and Windows server instances, transferred files to S3 buckets, and mounted EBS volumes.

But we were clearly short on time and had to skip most of the code examples.  In particular, we never got to the video sharing application — which was the entire reason I signed up.  While administering AWS is a necessary step in developing and deploying applications on Amazon’s infrastructure, it’s hard to justify spending $175 and the related costs of an entire day away from the office only to come back with no real insight into the architecture of an AWS application.  The session was touted as a “Developer Bootcamp” after all.

What could the presenters have done differently?  Four things:

1. Skip the 45-minute-long “team building” exercise at the beginning of the day.  For a one-day session during which there is no other group work, there’s no need to “team build.”  If you want to encourage people to meet others, a 10-minute round-robin of people introducing themselves and saying why they are attending would suffice.
2. Don’t switch the software requirements once attendees arrive (as our presenter did.)  We wasted valuable time as everyone tried to download the new code samples and consequently brought the entire network to a halt.  People should arrive at the session with all the necessary software installed and ready to go.   If people need help with configuring the software, maybe ask them to arrive early during the breakfast portion of the day?
3. Ensure that the network can handle the traffic.
4. Don’t spend so much session time answering tangential questions.  The goal of the day is to provide a developer-level look at how one can build an application on AWS.  Attendees who have specific questions about AWS or need clarification on things that aren’t core to the session should be encouraged to re-ask their questions at lunch.

Hopefully the presenters will improve in subsequent bootcamps.  Based on the peformance at this one, however, I can’t recommend it to other developers.

Update 2: Amazon has refunded the $175 I paid to attend the class.

When my local swim center set up their P.A. system, they decided to make it accessible via phone.  That way, staff members wouldn’t have to walk back to the office to make an announcement over the loudspeaker — they could just pick up any phone at the center, dial the P.A. system’s phone number, and start speaking.

I guess they figured the system wouldn’t be abused because only the staff members would know the phone number.  What they didn’t plan for, however, was telemarketers accidentally stumbling across the system as their auto-dialers try every possible phone number.

So imagine my surprise — and everyone else’s there at the pool the other day — when in the middle of the usual lap swim time a pitch for carpet cleaning services suddenly blasted out from the speakers.

Moral of the story? Just beause you think you’ve hidden some technical feature where no one will find it doesn’t mean they won’t.  If it’s important to you to hide something, use real security measures like a password.