Tag: Drupal

Comment Spammers: Dual IP Strategy

Spammers are never welcome, clutter up your comments and are a pain in the arse. They blow through your bandwidth, which then gets your ISP on your tail asking you to upgrade your account type. This costs you money. Here are some dual IP strategies that I found in analyzing my WordPress site’s comments.

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Drupal 6.2x to 7.2x Upgrade Failure

Oivey It simply did not work. I followed the recipe they had laid out for the upgrade, ran upgrade.php and got this mess of an error message. I suppose in time I will figure it out or abandon the site. Thankfully it was a test site with nothing in it. A test upgrade is the way to go for Drupal, because failing on a production site would be catastrophic.

PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table ‘xxx_dxxx2.blocked_ips’ doesn’t exist: SELECT 1 FROM {blocked_ips} WHERE ip = :ip; Array ( [:ip] => xx.xxx.xx.xx ) in drupal_is_denied() (line 1895 of /home/xxx/public_html/xxx/includes/bootstrap.inc).

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Minor Upgrade to my Drupal Install: Sept 2012

Procrastinate I did, and for a long time, but I bit the bullet today and upgraded my Drupal install. I had known that this was required a long time ago, as I had a suspicion that bots were attacking it. I do hate bots that attack me. It went well, all without drama. It was a minor upgrade.

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Reducing your Bandwidth for WordPress and Drupal

Busy I have been recently, with not much time for my blog, but it was all for a good cause. My internet service provider (ISP) informed me that I was taking up too much CPU time on their shared service and banned me. I am a good guy and generally follow the rules, so getting banned is out of character. After a frantic email they restored my account so that I could figure out what happened. I truly am a “less is more” type of guy, and that includes IT resources, and my online sites are pretty consistent, so a propensity of new content was not the issue. Eventually I took some steps to rein in the numerous bots that were scraping and doing whatever to my site, wasting my CPU usage on my tab, and eventually getting me banned. If your site is suffering the same fate, you may glean some hints and tips for reducing your CPU usage.

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Increasing Efficiency of Drupal 6’s Feed Aggregator

Drupal 6's Feed Aggregator works well

Drupal 6's Feed Aggregator works well


I really love Drupal 6’s feed aggregator. It has the ability to aggregate numerous RSS (Really Simple Sybndication) news or blog feeds, categorize them, and keep them current, all in the effort to save you the trouble of going to each news source and hunting for relevant news. All you have to do is chose a category, read the summary and click the link for the article you what you want.

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Converting Drupal 5.x Theme Foliage to 6.x


I really like Web 2.0 and particularly Drupal and WordPress. There’s so much functionality gained so quickly, fantastic upgradeability, reliability, and a great support community. Recently I converted my friend David’s Drupal 5.1 theme Foliage to Drupal 6.9. It’s really a painless (after you’ve done it) 3 step process that I’d like to share. Here’s how I did it.

References:
The original instructions from Drupal.org
Cutting to the important parts. Thanks Wesley Tanaka, this post was very helpful.

Files:
Unchanged files: block.tpl.php, box.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, and all the rest of the theme
Changed files: comment.tpl.php, page.tpl.php
Added files: foliage.info

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First try with Drupal on Site5


So my plan is to eventually migrate my website DonTai.com from Doteasy to Site5. I’ll use Drupal on Site5. Originally I wanted to get Drupal running on Site5, and then change my domain registrar. This way I don’t get any downtime on my site, not that this matters.

Interestingly, using Fantastico it was very easy to create a Drupal web site in my root directory. Fine. Unknown to me is the fact that the Drupal site is configured to http://dontai.com, which still points to my original site on Doteasy. I therefore cannot get to the new Drupal site using my domain name.

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