SSmith's blog

I have to share this. I have just started getting familiar with the Amazon EC2 product offering. And there is a lot to take in. So the first major hurtle I encountered, and found little in the way of clear documentation for, was sshing i my new instance.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/

This link helps. The tests are less then clear, and it would help to have context for what each step is doing, but it works.

After jumping into CI with both feet and a good part of my development team, I have decided to post some of the links and presentations I have found. With a few notes on how to process them. Once caveat, we do our work in the drupal development framework, so we are focused on CI for drupal and PHP.

Hudson – Your Escape from "Integration Hell"

DrupalCon 2010 - San Francisco - Tuesday Morning - First session from an Acquia member about how to handle or configure a server environment for 'hands-off' management.

1. Func
2. Splunk
3. Puppet - for drupal deployment.
4. Testing with continuous integration - Process for making sure everything is working. Allows the developers to know when and how things break.

To connect to a mySQL Db on a VMWare appliance, I needed to edit the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file.

Command: nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Action: comment (using #) the 'bind-address = 127.0.0.1'

Desc: This command binds the mysql server to only accept connections from the localhost. Great for security, bad for development. So unless you want to use command line mysql, you need to change this. Bad idea for a production mysql server as it opens the server to outside connections.

I recently ran into some context questions while working on a class. While I know that namespaces are important, I did not understand why they are important. A co-worker provided this feedback.

"A namespace enables you to group logically related classes. You are not required to provide a class with a namespace. However, several advantages result from grouping components into namespaces. First, namespaces prevent naming collisions. If two companies produce a component with the same name, then namespaces provide you with a method of distinguishing the

There are a lot of blog postings about moving a drupal site. I find them a little general. So here is my version, specific to the Mosso Cloud. While there are a lot of moving parts in a drupal setup, the are a limited number of things you need to do.

1. Export Database into a .sql file.

I have been working through a number of issues around the migration of a traditional web application to an Ajax implementation. We have a rather extensive ecommerce application that uses a two site model; the front end is the public ecommerce site, with a separate support/back office backend site. We decided last year to start the process of migrating support features in AJAX functions. The objective was to migrate the Support features into the public ecommerce site using a gradual coding process.

While I love, LOVE google. I now am starting to have warm and fuzzy feeling for woopra.com. Google analytics is good and it was the best, until woopra gave me more. Woopra provides real time site traffic information for who is on my sites, where they are doing and where they are going.

It appears that right now they are in beta mode, so they only let users have a limited number of domains to track. And the approval process can take a while. But once approved is has been an amazing tool for my clients.

The xml site map while great, needs some help. The setup docs are a little light. Meaning the developer needs to be a little more wordy with the settings and help messages.

So here are my recs. When setting up the search engine cron settings. The [Sitemap] value in the URL needs to be changed to have your sites URL and path to the sitemap node. I am not sure why the code does not replace the placeholder when the cron job submits to google. But it does not. So google will not see the correct node and index your site until you change this.