26 January 2010 | Web Development

Impressive sites built with Drupal

Here’s a list of impressive Drupal sites which I’ve found on the net. There are a few existing lists out there, some of which are at the bottom of this post, but I’m curating my own based on my own taste. If you know of any sites I’ve missed out that should be here, please write a comment below.

NGOs

Government Sites

Campaigns and Movements

Education

Publications (News, Magazines, etc)

Music-Related Organisations

Musicians

Enterprises

Tech

Tech Communities

Other Communities

Other lists of sites built with Drupal

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4 September 2009 | Web Development

LIVE at DrupalCon Paris 2009: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Session: Dr Clonelove: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud
Speaker: Peter Brownell, Co-Founder of School Of Everything, a Drupal based start-up in London. He is also a Director of Code Positive, and has been involved in the London Drupal Community for many years.

Session: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cloud

Notes

MySQL proxy changes the game.

“Clustering involves very high documentation. We run three servers. The idea is to move to small instances of dataases. Amazon gives you two main cluster machines. Large instances are 4 times more expensive than the small one. “

“When we began, it was obvious nothing was persistent.”

Handling failures

If your machine cannot be reconfigured, it can’t be in a cloud. You need to know how your machine was set up. Do things well. Assume that any part of the cloud can die.

  • How do we go about reconfiguring that?
  • Be able to rebuild from backups.
  • Document and blog.
  • Fire drill – practice makes perfect.

Rebuild debian host. Rebuild Drupal site. Drupal’s easy to rebuild. In emergencies, put in on a single server and temporarily disable some admin stuff that you don’t need; and then put it in front of a proxy.

Cloud City

Never have faith in just one ally. Set up a base off the cloud. Keep a backup on the ground. Monitor from the outside. Mail smarthost to avoid auto greylisting.

Foreseeing problems

Monitor as much as possible. Don’t trust anything. Look for clues for where problems arise. Do capacity planning. “We used Nagios and Munin”.

Hardware

The physical world moves a little slower. Virtual machines are cheap but you need to plan. Configure one original and make many copies, in multiple zones. Only pay for the time you use. It’s not two of everything always, it’s a spare when you need it.

The pieces putting the cluster together

  • How safe is your data on the storage? “For the first month, we ran our MySQL database on EC2.
  • Write to S3, read from local DB.
  • Elastic Block Store – EBS.
  • Point-in-time snapshots.

Clone 2 Clone Filesystem

  • Avoid dependencies
  • ClusterFS sync files instantly
  • Primary webserver uses persistent storage
  • Deliver images off S3. Drupal cloudfront modules makes it easy. Upgrade to Amazon’s CDN for a bit more.
  • Round Robin DNS is a cheap solution for load balancing.

Summary

Cloud forces best practice. No time for slacker sysadmins!
Avoid dependencies. Work backwards
Document!

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11 March 2009 | Web Development

LinkedIn

What I like about LinkedIn is you can just reply to LinkedIn messages from your email client. Takes away the hassle of logging in.

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20 February 2009 | Web Development

Is your Mac's optical drive making noise?

Apple has a page where you can listen to samples of the normal sounds your DVD drive makes, so you can find out if your drive is making that extra burp or hiccup. Quite smart. Icons next to the list of sounds would make it easier to read. How else would you design it?

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18 February 2009 | Web Development

Beanstalk upgrades free plan to 100MB

Great news for web developers working with clients on a budget. Beanstalk, the hosted Subversion solution, just upgraded their free plan from 10MB to 100MB. This is the happy mail I got in my inbox today:

This is an update for all Beanstalk account owners who are currently on the FREE plan. Today we upgraded storage on all free accounts from 20MB to 100MB.

We hope this upgrade will allow you to use Beanstalk more effectively and utilize larger repositories while you get to know the system.

You may also consider upgrading to a paid plan, which includes:

Please reply to this email if you have any questions or feedback.

Thanks,
Chris Nagele
Founder, Beanstalk
http://beanstalkapp.com

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