Achieving sub 10ms performance for authenticated users with Drupal

Posted on 26 January 2012 by Sim

Disclaimer: This is a work in progress, and as such probably not quite suitable for production sites unless you understand the issues and want to “chip in”. We all know the problem: Drupal has an excellent caching system that serves … Continue reading →

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Running Large Scale Web Sites

Posted on 30 October 2011 by Sim

Below are links to a couple of articles on Slashdot about the hardware and software required to run a massively high traffic website. Hardware Requirements Software Requirements

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Moving Drupal modules from sites/all/modules to sites/all/modules/contrib

Posted on 11 October 2011 by Sim

If you move your local repository of Drupal modules from sites/all/modules to sites/all/modules/contrib you may find that your site dies with error messages like “failed opening required”. This is because Drupal stores the location of the module files in system … Continue reading →

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Launch of ShopGreenwich.co.uk site

Posted on 3 August 2011 by Sim

I’m delighted to announce the launch of my latest customer project ShopGreenwich.co.uk. The site was built with Drupal 7 and makes extensive use of taxonomies (categorisation), google maps. It also implements the Apache Solr search engine combined with Drupal’s “faceted … Continue reading →

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3d Graphics Revolution

Posted on 1 August 2011 by Sim

For a number of years the goal of graphics technology has been to create 3d images and environments that are “indistinguishable from reality”. That is, when you look at a computer generated image, it’s hard or impossible to tell if … Continue reading →

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Garra rufa Fish Pedicures

Posted on 24 May 2011 by Sim

Over the weekend I made this site for my girlfriends business, Fish Pedicure in Dorset The site is still a little rough around the edges but we’ll get a graphic designer on the case in the near future. For now … Continue reading →

Posted in Content Management, Web Development, e-commerce | 2 Comments

Geocoding and Google Mapping with Drupal

Posted on 24 May 2011 by Sim

Just thought I’d show you the “dealer locator” I built recently for Armour Automotive. The dealer locator is built using the Drupal GMAP and Location modules in conjunction with my own bespoke module. The bespoke module makes it possible to … Continue reading →

Posted in Content Management, Web Development, e-commerce | 10 Comments

Changing the collation of all tables in a mysql database

Posted on 20 February 2011 by Sim

If you’re reading this, you’re probably wanting to change the collation of your mysql database to utf8_general_ci in order to support non-English characters. There seems to be lots of methods out there for doing this, probably none of which are … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL programming | 4 Comments

Launch of Solatricity website

Posted on 20 January 2011 by Sim

Just a quick announcement to the world that I’ve recently launched this site for one of the uk’s leading solar panel installation companies. The site has been built using the Drupal 6 content management system and has a suite of … Continue reading →

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Scalextric Muscle Car

Posted on 19 January 2011 by Sim

I’ve been getting interest in my Scalextric lap timer software recently, which reminded me about this project that I did a couple of years or so ago. My friend had a few broken Scalextric cars lying around (not to mention … Continue reading →

Posted in Inventions, Scalextric | 1 Comment