GoDaddy took down my web site!

Earlier this week GoDaddy experienced downtime on their DNS services that caused rippling domain name resolution issues for millions of sites. General users see this as a site not loading in their browser. More technically, when you request a site in your browser (like, ‘awesome-web-site.com’), your computer then requests information from your Internet Service Provider […]

WordPress: Moving your site to a new domain

As a preliminary note, always use relative URLs where possible. Always use relative URLs where possible (it is worth repeating). There are a lot of plugins that offer easy ways to move your site. I’m not going to go into great detail, but highlight that at the core all of these services do two things. […]

Drupal Deployment with a Git post-receive hook

Drupal deployment and maintenance often proves challenging when teams of developers are involved in a given Drupal project. A great way to reduce deployment pains is to use a distributed version control system, and integrate deployment efforts in your DVCS. As Drupal core is using Git, I am focusing on Git as a DVCS and […]

Drupal 7: Partial word search

Drupal’s default search technique periodically processes all new content and stores keywords and keyword details in separate database tables (search_*). This allows Drupal to run searches by investigating exact matches on the search_index table alone and reviewing pre-calculated scores therein. Searching exact word matches in a dedicated table (search_index) is much faster in MySQL (and […]

Android: Resizable background images with 9 patch

One concern when developing for Android devices is supporting the various screens that are available. Android does a fairly good job with this, by allowing various drawable directories for particular screens, and allowing layout configurations using density-independent pixel (dp) instructions. There is good information at developer.android.com regarding tips and best practices for supporting various screen […]