We had already let you know that we would be using Aloha Editor as the WYSIWYG editor in Spark. In short: it has a very complete feature set, a proven plug-in system, solid cross-browser support, it can do “nested editables”, and so on; but most notably it’s the best WYSIWYG editor out there that can do “true WYSIWYG”.

Sprint

The most notable goals were:

A few weeks ago, we showed the in-line editing prototype we had built for Spark, which has now blossomed into Edit module. Additionally, we also pointed out that we were in the process of selecting the WYSIWYG editor to use in Spark. This selection process was performed in the public Spark issue queue, in order to gather community feedback and to attempt to reach consensus. 73 people followed that issue, about two dozen of whom contributed to the discussion as well.

After working at Nascom for a very brief time, I will soon start working at Acquia! I’ll be working on the Spark project as a Senior Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), reporting directly to Dries!

Why I left Nascom

I chose Nascom because I felt it was the best fit for me. I really preferred working for a Belgian company. Nascom seemed to have it all¹, but in the end, it was not a good match. I still stand by my choice of Nascom being the best possible choice I could have made, when limiting my choices to Belgian companies. They’re great. But the spark was missing for me.

Speed up your Drupal site with a CDN in a few minutes.

The fun part: it’s nice to learn how to make any Drupal site significantly faster in a few minutes. The profit part: faster websites lead to more users and more revenue.

This article covers the common case: you have a small to medium size (≤1M page views per month), without massive amounts of large images, you’re using Drupal 7¹ and you only want to spend a few euros or (U.S.) dollars per month on a CDN. (You already know what a CDN is, right?)
So, you want your Drupal site to be faster, only spend a few minutes doing so, don’t want to deal with infrastructure and want to keep the costs very minimal. You’ve come to the right place.

Also: don’t worry about the cost: this little experiment will only cost you a few cents.

I recently had my site redesigned (and that’s still in flux), but I also had a logo designed. Since I’m very much fond of llamas, I decided my logo would be a llama. (That one sits at the bottom of every page and greets you on the front page.) It was drawn by Ine Spee, whom has recently moved to the U.K. but is actually a fellow citizen of my hometown of Hasselt, Belgium.

A few weeks ago, a bank clerk told me I should get a personalized card soon if I wanted it for free… A happy coincidence of events later, and I now have a llama bank card! :)

It seems I’ve started an “Awesome Bank Card Saga”, since this is my second one already — back in 2008, I got a Drupal bank card! :)

The design

The result

On January 2, I announced that I was looking for a job. Since that announcement, I’ve talked with >65 companies. I’ve had actual interviews with >30 of them. Most of them are based out of Belgium, some were remote. Many were Drupal shops, several were start-ups (some of which from Belgium, but most of which from the U.S.) but there were also many different types of companies. From very small to very big. So much choice!

(Also see The Paradox of Choice.)

Startup

Whenever I felt that a company was interested in possibly pursuing the start-up idea that I have had for a long time, I pitched it. The few times that I did this, there was a lot of enthusiasm. But only one company really pushed forward in pursuing this: Nascom. Funny enough, this also happened to be the company that offered me the most interesting, versatile and challenging job. This made me realize that a start-up (in Belgium!) might not be as unrealistic as I had first thought.

You want to set up key-based authentication so you can ssh into a server without entering that pesky password over and over again?

If you have to do this often, then use this wonderful one-liner to install the public key of your system on a remote server¹:

cat ~/.ssh/id_?sa.pub | ssh <host> 'mkdir -p .ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

Easy, right²? Replace <host> with your host, or possibly even user@host. To be able to use just <host>, you’ll want to configure SSH host aliases, e.g.:

Host seedbox2
    HostName norris.com
    User chuck
    Port 55555