My name is Ben. I am a Drupal developer living in Washington, DC.

I switched to a Nexus 4 back in February, partly out of tech curiosity and partly out of frustration with stagnant iOS innovation. While I still believe that iOS is stagnant and behind the times, with WWDC a few short weeks away, I have renewed hope that Apple can turn it around.

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A few weeks back, my iPhone started acting strangely. It would freeze up for a few seconds, the Home button wasn’t working consistently, and the battery wasn’t really working great. I knew it soon would be time to replace it. Friends, co-workers, and family had been on me to take a look at the Nexus 4 — and my curiosity got the better of me.

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Typically the system_settings_form() function isn’t considered for more complex operations or data types beyond integers and strings. What if you want to save an array to a variable? Or what if you need to transform a string value containing a username into an integer user ID? Normally, these cases would require a custom #submit callback, but I want to propose an alternative.

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After 3 years on a Linode VPS, benclark.com is now powered by Amazon Web Services. Although I was a happy Linode customer, a lot has changed in the last 3 years. Recently I’ve been kicking myself for not learning more about AWS, and that got me thinking about why I’m not learning other new things.

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There are four different kinds of Drupal developers, and they move along a predictable life cycle. We all start out as beginners hacking away at the theme, but if the environment is right, we grow up to be good Drupal citizens.

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I started working from home when I joined Jackson River, and after a week or two of settling in, I realized four things about myself. As it turns out, it’s not hard at all to get into “work mode” And overall, I’m a lot more productive. But there are downsides, too: I find that it’s hard to stop working at the end of the day. And after over a year of working from home, I felt cut off from the world.

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So, call me crazy, but when I’ve got a dozen Terminal windows and tabs open at once, and they’re all ssh’d to different boxes, it gets hard to remember which host is which. I end up checking the prompt or doing something like hostname to remember where I am. So, I found a way to automatically switch the Terminal settings to color-code my SSH hosts.

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My last post on this subject was just a collection of notes. I’ve edited it down to a list of actual things that should be done to improve Drupal performance.

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Some notes related to Drupal performance that I compiled during my Day of Personal Enrichment (DOPE) at Jackson River.

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Drupal offers built-in support for sites in virtual subdirectories, e.g. www.example.com/subdir, but getting this up and running under Lighttpd is not well documented. Fear not, for it can be done with only minor configuration file tweaks and a few extra mod_rewrite directives.

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Let’s start with the obvious. First, if you run more than one Drupal site on a single server, you should be running those sites in multisite configuration. Second, if you’re looking for exceptional Drupal performance and a small memory footprint, you should experiment with Lighttpd. This howto explains how to run multisite Drupal on Lighttpd.

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After struggling with Guestbook spam on benandmaggiegetmarried.com, I realized how slow Dreamhost had become; after moving to a Dedicated-Virtual account at MediaTemple on Monday, I ultimately migrated my sites to a Linode virtual machine running Arch Linux & lighttpd.

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