Along with hundreds of other Drupalistas, we registered for DrupalCon DC yesterday. It’s sure to be one of the best events of the year and we’re looking forward to it. This will be our second DrupalCon and fourth major Drupal event.

We’ll be in the D.C. area for a few days following DrupalCon. Let us know at the conference or leave a comment below if you’d like to join us for some fun at the Smithsonian (dirt! butterflies! dinosaurs!) and the newly relocated Newseum, an enormous interactive monument created to celebrate the world of news and the free press. It’s too early to tell, but we also hope to go to the annual Kite Flying Festival if it’s scheduled close to the conference.

See you at DrupalCon DC!

Did you know?

• In March, the average temperature in Washington D.C. is 46°F (7.7°C).
• D.C.’s population is predominantly African-American, making it a minority-majority.
• If you want a White House tour, it must be arranged well in advance through your senator or member of congress. If you’re not a U.S. citizen, contact your embassy in D.C.
• Our favorite movies that feature D.C. include Dave, Absolute Power, In the Line of Fire and, of course, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

When describing Boston, many people who’ve lived there for a time have told me things like, "Boston feels like a small town" and "Boston has the rudest, most suicidal drivers I’ve ever seen” and, regardless of whether or not they’re one of those drivers, “Be careful when entering that intersection!"

That’s really just the beginning.  read more »

Webmonkey, once a premiere resource on the nuts and bolts of web development, is back after a 6 year hiatus and I’m pretty excited about it. One reason is partly nostalgic, of course, since this is the place where I learned about web safe colors, made my first favicon and got serious about PHP/MySQL development. Remember, this was back in the days when Apple was charging $30 for a "preview" of what became OS X and tabbed browsing was only possible with the MultiZilla extension for Mozilla.

Ah, fond memories. I think I still have a copy of their HTML character entity cheatsheet somewhere.

Another reason I’m excited is that Webmonkey recently interviewed Acquia’s founders, Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson. Most of what’s discussed, such as Drupal’s history and future and how Acquia was started, has been already been said before but I did find it interesting that in the interview, Jay alludes to how Drupal’s "Community Plumbing" slogan may soon be on its way out:  read more »

This is a simple Firefox extension that redirects the browser to the secure (SSL) version of the user login and edit pages at drupal.org, drupalcon.org, groups.drupal.org and groupsbeta.drupal.org. The thought behind this was that I didn’t want to expose any passwords while using the open wireless network at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

Drupal allows creating posting guidelines for content types but not for comments. Countless weblogs and web columns today have comment posting guidelines and I’ve always been surprised that Drupal doesn’t have built-in support for it.  read more »

An entry in DreamHost’s official weblog jokingly predicted the future last December when it said, “If your next web hosting bill from us is mysteriously tripled, now you know why.”

In an cruel twist of events, the prediction came true today. Unfortunately, the predicted amount was short by several orders of magnitude. DreamHost’s billing mistake ended up overcharging their customers over US$7M — in one day.  read more »

When it comes to startups and long-distance runners, being a front runner is a good thing. It’s illegal elsewhere (such as in the stock market), however, and the term “domain front running” is now being used to describe what can happen if a company unethically snatches your domain idea in between the time you search for a domain and try to register it.  read more »

A recent client asked us to help prevent members in her online community from using email addresses from throwaway email address providers, and it turned out that we’d already done this before in another project we’ve been working on in our spare time. How convenient! We simply exported the ‘access’ table and imported it into the new project’s database and we were good to go.  read more »

A post on the drupal.org discussion forum recently caught my attention:

I’m running a CMS which restricts access by using OG. As such users are registered to one group or another and in order to do away with unnecessary clicks I’d like a user to be automatically directed to the group front page to which they belong. As such if I belong to the ‘design’ group, the system should automatically redirect me to the ‘design’ home page when I log in. Is there a module that will enable this for me?  read more »

A client of ours was having trouble recently when uploading files to their Drupal site. Their webhost had set values in the default php.ini file too low (a common limitation of shared hosting), and we needed to increase the upload_max_filesize and post_max_size values. This account was limited more than most and overriding the php.ini defaults the usual way (by adding various lines to the .htaccess or settings.php files) didn’t work at all.  read more »