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
I ran into SSL timeouts on in local development setup when I was re-factoring some integration code with facebook and using their SDK. It was tricky to diagnose, I was sure that my changes couldn’t be the cause, and I finally confirmed it by running our production codebase. Since it was having the same timeout
I came across Dan Crow’s insights into startups and older workers this morning, and I couldn’t stop myself from nodding in agreement through out the article. Part of it, surely, is that I am now closer to 40 than 30. But everything he says about the value of spending time with family, the pointlessness of