I gave a talk tonight on node.js, and related technologies, to the Vancouver Drupal Users Group. The talk ran through why node.js is useful for realtime web apps, how to get it and Express up and running, and how to access data from Drupal and MongoDB.

I gave a talk today at the 2010 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit on using Drupal as a datastore for Javascript applications.

You can check out the slides on Slideshare or download the PDF [22 MB].

I made a simple class that provides a simple SQLite-based persistant FIFO stack class for PHP 5 (similar conceptually to Stack::Persistent in Perl).

A number of times I've written Drupal scripts that run out of memory while trying to process large amounts of nodes (changing taxonomy, etc.). Adding them to a persistant stack, then doing them in batches, is an easy way to remedy this.

Example usage:

A case study of the migration to Drupal of Straight.com is now on the Drupal.org front page.

I ran into some snags while trying to use Ubuntu for offline Drupal development and have noted them down for future reference.

After getting LAMP installed, I added "AllowOverride All" to the necessary directories in the Apache config, but Drupal clean URLs wouldn't work. It turns out that, unlike Centos, Ubuntu doesn't enable mod_rewrite on Apache by default. The solution was enterning "sudo a2enmod rewrite".

According to Drupal usage stats, over 40 sites are using the Multiforms survey/contest module I developed with the help of Geoff Burke and Miles Kier. That's not a huge number, but will motivate me to clean up the code and improve the documentation. I've definitely learned a lot about Drupal, and development in general, since I started the project a year and a half ago.

The Django databrowse application is an interesting piece of software that I've wanted to try out ever since its creator, Adrian Holovaty, demoed it in Vancouver last year. Its purpose is to allow you to navigate data, using a web interface, looking for trends and other interesting aspects.

Two projects I am watching with a lot of interest are Pinax and Drupy.

I just committed a Drupal input filter for Haml to Drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/haml. It depends on phpHaml, which in turn depends on PHP 5.

I'll be doing a talk this Friday at the sold-out Drupal Camp Vancouver on the fast and elegant Sphinx search engine. Sphinx is open source, straightforward, and used by folks like NowPublic and The Pirate Bay to provide scalable search.