Ron Golan's blog

In my last blog post, I described setting up a website on Rackspace Cloud Sites and adding a simple automated backup system. Making those backups requires use of scheduled tasks or cron jobs and each time one of those scheduled tasks runs, a separate log file is added to the logs directory. Unfortunately, Rackspace Cloud Sites never removes them no matter how old they are. They just accumulate and take up space for which you are charged. That can be fixed by adding another scheduled task.

Hosting is anything but a one size fits all situation. Sites which demand the highest performance will certainly benefit from customized backend architecture and tuning. For the large majority of less demanding sites, there is the spectrum from the few dollars per month shared managed hosting to the VPS (virtual private server).

At Urban Insight we've found that some Drupal sites are a good fit with hosting on Rackspace Cloud Sites. One requirement of ours is automated backups, which Rackspace Cloud Sites does not provide. Rackspace does provide some help with this in the form of scripts that can be used for backups, but you need to do the setup yourself, and one feature we wanted was lacking. What follows is a quick overview of setting up a Drupal site on Rackspace Cloud Sites with an emphasis on backups and how we added the missing backup feature we wanted, rotating backups.

Homebrew is a package manager that makes it easy to install UNIX tools which don't come with OS X. Using the Homebrew package manager provides a great amount of control over the software installed on an OS X system, and it can be used to provide missing elements to run Drupal directly on OS X as a development environment.

I didn't set out to use Homebrew. I simply wanted to use wget instead of curl. I had no idea that would lead me to completely change my development setup.

Normally caching pages for anonymous users is a good thing. There are times however, when a page or two needs to be excluded from the cache. Just such a situation recently occurred while I was working on the website for the Southern California Linux Expo.

As a conference website, there were the usual lists of speakers, sessions and a schedule page listing all the sessions in grid ordered by room and time. With over 100 sessions, that page was expensive to generate and since it didn't change much was a great candidate for page caching.

Making it possible to override a module's output using a template and CSS.

We know that modules should provide themable output so the presentation can be modified using functions, templates and CSS. In the tiny example module that I created in my last blog post, I didn't do that. Here I will address that deficiency and show an example of what needs to be added to the BC Reminder module to give themers a chance to customize the output to their desires.

A really simple module can be very useful!

A number of the sites we host here at Urban Insight are monitored by Binary Canary. Binary Canary is a web service that continually checks to see if a website is online and sends out alerts when it's not. It can report system outages via email and SMS.

Binary Canary is a very reliable service, but there was one action on our part that would trip a false alarm occasionally. On a Drupal site, when updates need to be performed it's possible to forget that it is being monitored by Binary Canary and to put the site into maintenance mode without first disabling the monitoring service. When that would happen everyone on the alert list received a Binary Canary alert about one minute later.

Besides cleaning up bad HTML and saving us form dangerous scripts, text filters can be handy in other ways. Let's look at an example and how to create your own simple text filter. I'll cover this in Drupal 6 but doing it for Drupal 7 is very similar.

Most of the time, you want the text output by Drupal to resemble, as closely as possible, the text input. What about those times when you want to transform the output text? Text filters and input formats do just that. It turns out that as far as Drupal modules go, text filters are pretty bare bones and some of the easiest to code.