ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.

When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.

Now you might say your site doesn't have any broken URLs as you haven't changed any. Well that's great, but as your site grows, it is going to be a target for spammers and hackers. They are going to start requesting all sorts of file to see if they can find an exploit. Instead of bootstrapping Drupal each time to tell them that DLL file doesn't exist, it would be much better if Apache could just say that, to save resources for your real users.

So, what can you do? How can you stop Drupal from handling 404s but not break modules like imagecache?

At the ParentsClick Network we are soon to be rolling out many more sites on our platform. Because of our unique community API (which I will be detailing in a future post) we are running many sites (many not yet released) on the same install of Drupal, with the same database, and no shared tables. Yes, no typos there. More on just how that works in a later post.

One thing we have to do is change the theme based on the URL, along with a host of other things. ZivTech recently posted about changing themes, but for our setup, we need something more low level. Hence this technique.

SimpleFeed 2.1

SimpleFeed 2.1 has been released, grab it while it's hot!

This release fixes a number of outstanding issues and greatly improves the robustness of SimpleFeed. Highlighted fixes include:

* Critical update, fixes updating of feed items to use the new unique identifier, before it only made it through 50 items, causing duplicate headaches
* Unique identifier for feed items now relies on a combination of title & link, which will pave the way for updating changed feed item bodies later
* Support for much longer length URLs
* Improved database indices
* Fix expiration of feed items so it can run properly as anonymous user cron

Well, it took longer than I expected (announced it a couple months back), but I'm pleased to announce that my Blueprint Drupal Theme has been released!

This theme uses the most excellent Blueprint CSS framework to setup a starter Drupal theme to make theming websites faster and easier, especially in the cross browser area. The benefits of this framework include:
* An easily customizable grid
* Sensible typography
* Relative font-sizes everywhere
* A typographic baseline
* An extendable plugin system
* Perfected CSS reset
* A stylesheet for printing
* Powerful scripts for customizing your layout
* No bloat of any kind

Compared to the YUI grid CSS, I find Blueprint simpler and more elegant. I have used both frameworks on various projects and the Blueprint has consistently been easier and faster to work with.

MothersClick is a flourishing site that is growing very quickly. As such, tracking user behavior with Google Analytics is becoming very important as it helps to determine how to adjust the site to better meet the needs of our users. And now, as we prepare to launch our full ParentsClick Network of sites, we need to track what they are doing across our network of sites.

Well thankfully Analytics makes this easier through its ability to track outbound links and cross domain links. But the problem then arises, who is going to update all of those hardcoded links with Javascript code? Is there an easier way?

MothersClick placed 1st in the Niche Social Networking category for SEOmoz’s 3rd Annual Web 2.0 Awards. I’m very pleased with the result as myself and the rest of the MothersClick team have really been working our tails off launching version 3 of our platform just a few months ago. Expect a more detailed look at this new version (including information about our brand new community API for Drupal to be released late summer/fall) in a future blog post.

Congratulations to other Drupal winners on this list including imbee who placed 3rd in the niche social networking category, NowPublic who placed 2nd in social news, and to our friends at jQuery who placed 3rd in WebDev.

Everytime I add an event to my Mac iCal Calendar, I set a reminder so I don't forget. But overtime this gets annoying, so many popups. Sure, I could open my calendar, but if it's not in front of me, I'm going to either ignore it or forget to check. There must be a way to stick your calendar on your desktop?

Well I googled and tried a bunch of apps but nothing really worked--till I found iCalViewer. What a wonderful program! I can select any of my calendars to show on my desktop, specify how far in the future I want (configurable for each calendar!) and it includes all day events along with birthdays (if you enter those into address book). Now, no more forgetting about some upcoming event. Well worth the $11!

Here's a snapshot of it running on my desktop:

Just in time for Mother's Day, the 2nd Annual "Cookbook for Moms" is now for sale! This year we have teamed up with Missy Chase Lapine, author of "The Sneaky Chef" in helping us raise money for the Boys and Girls Club.

Moms have submitted their recipes and the community has voted for the top 40. From there, those recipes were exported from the site and into the Blurb publishing system, where they were meticulously edited, laid out, and designed up for an awesome looking cookbook.

From the press release:

The 2nd Annual "Cookbook for Moms" is an original publication, featuring a unique collection of family recipes and personal stories that have been submitted and voted on by moms online.

"As a mom who understands the importance of family mealtimes, it's great to have Missy contributing to our efforts," said Andra Davidson, president of MothersClick. "This cookbook is our Mother's Day gift to the members of our online community and moms everywhere. The concept of sharing recipes is very much in line with MothersClick's overall mission of exchanging parenting information and advice between moms. And most satisfying of all: this purchase truly gives back, as all of our proceeds will support the kids being helped by The Boys & Girls Clubs."

"This is a unique collaboration of community and a novel fundraiser," says Roxanne Spillett, President, Boys & Girls Clubs of America. "We appreciate the ongoing charitable efforts of MothersClick on our behalf."

Featuring over 40 original recipes, the "Cookbook for Moms" offers a treasured collection of family favorites, contributed by moms from across the world, recipes that are quick and healthy for busy families and dishes that can be prepared with children. These are recipes that have been voted best by moms online, and selected entries include a personal description about the dish and each contributor.

Last week when I was in NYC for MothersClick meetings, I met for an interview with Jerad Bitner and Dave Burns, both developers at SonyBMG. These guys run a site called DrupaLMAO, a Diggnation inspired site that posts weekly videos talking about the Drupal community.

SimpleFeed was released a little over 4 months ago and has been working out very well. However, it still wasn’t fast enough—-at least for me. It could work faster, it could be more efficient. So over the past month or two I’ve really reworked some of the internal logic, making things much more efficient. I also borrowed a tip from FeedAPI about hashing entire feeds to check for updates faster and simplified the unique hash of each feed item to be much faster to compute and compare.