This is a cool utility that uses YSlow! and PhantomJS to measure your site’s speed across many pages. Should be good for identifying slow individual pages as well as practices that impact multiple pages. This is how it works: You feed it with a start URL and how deep you want it to crawl. The […]
Adam Culp posted the 3rd article in his Clean Development Series this week, Dirty Code (how to spot/smell it). When you read it, you should keep in mind that he is pointing out practices which correlate with poorly written code not prescribing a list of things to avoid. It’s a good list of things to
This past weekend, my colleague and friend Sandy Smith participated in Election Hackathon 2012 (read his take of the hackathon). We built our first public Musketeers.me product, Candidata.me. This was my first hackathon, and it was exciting and exhausting to bring something to life in little more than 24 hours. Our idea combined a number of
Large organizations want to, or may actually need, strict access control and content review workflows to manage the publishing process on their website. Drupal’s default roles and permissions system is designed to handle the simplest of setups. However, there is a wide variety of modules that each address these needs. Many of them overlap, some
This has been in the works for a bit now, and I’m excited to announce that along with Eli White, Kevin Bruce, and Sandy Smith, we’ve formed muskeeters.me. We worked well together at our previous venture, that we wanted to keep it going. The new venture will do the usual web consulting, from strategy and
I needed to automate copying files for a website that I was building. Since this site was hosted on an inexpensive shared hosting plan, I didn’t have the luxury of shell or rsync access to automate copying files from my local development environment to the host. The only option was FTP, and after wasting too
The linkedin password breach highlighted once again the risks associated with storing user passwords. I hope you are not still storing passwords in the clear and are using a one-way salted hash before storing them. But, the algorithm you choose to use is also important. If you don’t know why, go read You’re Probably Storing
An honest write up with first hand details of the shortcomings of couchdb in production. There’s a reason to stick with proven technologies and not simply chasing the latest shiny. Not saying sauce labs did that, just sayin’. This post describes our experience using CouchDB, and where we ran into trouble. I’ll also talk about
I think this is an improvement to how we write for the web. Instead of optimizing for a machine algorithm that can bring traffic to an article, writers must concentrate on making the article interesting so that readers will share it with their friends. Curation is the key, which is also why I hated the
Seems this is always a tricky one that I run into when setting up a new test site. If you want to lock down the entire site behind a password, but need to allow some unauthenticated requests for external integration, then have a look at the solution below. It uses SetEnvIf to open up access