Blog

Russian translation {#russian-translation}

My article “Improving Drupal’s page loading performance” — definitely my most popular writing thus far, bookmarked almost 350 times on delicious — has been translated into Russian! So any people who prefer to read it in Russian, read it over there!

Drupal Fire {#drupal-fire}

John Forsythe selected my web site for his new project, Drupal Fire:

Drupal Fire is a new content aggregator that brings together the best writers, developers, and designers the Drupal community has to offer.
The site features 30 hand-picked feeds that I believe represent the best, most interesting content in the Drupal universe. You won’t find a higher signal-to-noise ratio anywhere else. I’m glad that my writing efforts — as sparse as they are due to time constraints — are appreciated. :)
I think it makes sense now that to offer focused alternatives of the Drupal Planet — it has become so big! 30 instead of 304 sources is a huge difference. For now I’ll stick to the planet, but I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio has been dropping steadily.

This is a very short tutorial — it should take you about 15 minutes from start to end — that explains how to run your own SVN server, install WebSVN, which is a web front-end to browse your SVN repository, and apply Drupal syntax highlighting to it.

An example can be seen used to be online at websvn.wimleers.com.

SVN {#svn}

I run my own SVN repository, because it’s much faster (svn:// FTW), I don’t have size limitations, I can ensure it’s backed up properly and because it’s so easy. I’m going to assume you’ve already installed svn on your (Linux) server.

First, decide where you’re going to put all your SVN repositories. I put mine at /data/svn. Whenever I use the e command, use your favorite editor instead (for me e is an alias for TextMate). Then go through these simple steps:

cd /data/svn
svnadmin create reponame

Create a SVN repository with the name reponame. This creates a certain directory structure.

In my session at DrupalCon DC, I promised an initial version of the Episodes module by March 15, which is today. I’m glad to be able to announce that I somewhat met that goal.

If you don’t know what it is exactly, I encourage you to read the project description first.

Status {#status}

It’s not yet completely finished: the basic reporting UI must still be written. But you can already look at the results of each individual page through the Firebug add-on (which I didn’t write, it’s already available). See the first screenshot for that. That’s of course much less useful, but it gives you a clear indication of the potential.
However, before I do that, I first have to work on making other deadlines for other courses.
So what’s done already? Here’s an overview:

After 15.5 hours of travelling (1.5 hours on the train, 8.5 hours of flying, 20 minutes of bus, 30 minutes in the metro and the rest spent waiting or walking), I arrived at the Harrington Hotel in Washington D.C. Immediately afterwards, I left for the pre-con registration, at which already about 400 people registered themselves.

Volunteering

The next day I got up at 6:08 AM since I couldn’t sleep due to the heat in the hotel room and because I was volunteering at the DrupalCon registration booth. With about 10 volunteers, we registered about 800 people in 2 hours (registering consists of giving them their lanyard, personalized name card, swag bag and redirecting them to the t-shirt booth). It worked pretty efficiently :)

Thanks, Drupal community! {#thank-you-bonnie}

I’d like to thank Bonnie Bogle once more for her Herculean organizing efforts. And of course a thank you to all attendees whom all partially paid for my travel expenses and Drupalcon ticket (I won a scholarship). I hope you’ll all benefit from my work in the end!

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt’s station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it’d be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

I’ve got so much exciting good news that I don’t even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn’t in the middle of my exam period…

Reviewing a Drupal book

Packt Publishing contacted me on January 7, asking if I was interested in reviewing Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions. It’ll be my first book review, but I’ve always had eye for detail, consistency and clarity in books (I have yet to see the first U.S. college text book that is well written), so I hope it’ll be of use to somebody :)
You can expect the review towards the end of February. What interests me is that it’s targeted at business owners instead of developers, so I’ll do a practical test with my dad, who’s not technically adept.

I keep all my Drupal sites up-to-date by updating a single Drupal core instance and one install profile. And I keep Drupal core and all modules in this install profile updated through CVS. But then a problem poses: what if a file was added to or removed from CVS? Until now, you’d have to manually svn add or svn rm the file. And in the case of some modules (e.g. Views), that’s a lot of files you’ll have to check.

The solution: syncvsvn {#solution}

I’m aware that this probably isn’t the best name, but it gets the job done :).

Suppose you’ve just updated the xmlsitemap module:

It has bothered me since day one at university that I can only use the university’s SMTP server. I got by, by just letting sent messages fail, because then I’d get a pop-up which would let me pick another SMTP server. This was of course far from perfect: sometimes I thought a message was sent while it really wasn’t … so it would sit in my outbox for a day.

Possible solutions {#possible-solutions}

The only real solution is for the university’s network to be improved: they should find a way to limit network traffic and abuse in ways that don’t affect the user so severely. (On the bright side: the wireless network was incredibly unreliable the first 2 years but is superb since this year!)
Until that happy day, I needed an interim solution. The best solution would involve an SSH tunnel to keep using the correct SMTP server. It also requires you to have a server somewhere with SSH access. I don’t want to maintain that too, so I chose for a simpler solution.

For several courses at the university, we’ve got projects going on (actually, 5 simultaneously…) and for most of them, we have to write fairly large documents. We also have to work in groups of 2, 3 or 5. So collaborative writing becomes a necessity. Finally, in the group of 5, we work on 4 different operating systems. So whichever solution we pick, it must seamlessly work on any platform as well.

We chose LyX.

• LyX is a WYSIWYM GUI to write LaTeX documents.
• LyX is written in Qt, a cross-platform GUI toolkit (the most awesome one, if you ask me!), which makes it possible to use it on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• To make LyX collaborative, we use the SVN version control system (which is also cross-platform).

This is how we started. But some problems emerged:

I’ve alluded to it before, but now it’s also been officially approved: I’ll be doing my bachelor thesis on Drupal! I will focus on integrating Drupal with CDNs. Yay! :)

Don’t know what a CDN is? It’s short for Content Delivery Network; a network of (static file or streaming media) servers that are located around the globe. These servers all mirror each others’ files. When a user requests a certain file from the CDN, the server that is the closest to the user will serve the file.
By using a CDN to serve the static components on your web site (CSS, JS, images, fonts), your web site will load much faster: the latency will be lower and the throughput will be greater.