Engineered Web

I used to have a boss that talked about the difference between a programmer and a software engineer. He would say things like, "I hired engineers not programmers. I can get programmers cheap. I want code that's designed." The problem of code being hacked together rather than designed is all too common. Let's take a look at why engineering a solution is better than hacking it together. Read more »

Until recently, I had come to the conclusion that web forums were dead. When it came to new sites or conversations about web technologies forums were something I avoided all together. Forums just didn't seem to fit within the current paradigm of web technologies and there seemed to be better ways to have the same kind of communication. That was until recently when I saw a variation of forums that works in this new paradigm. Read more »

Bazaar, the version control system, has been my source control management tool of choice for the past several months. Not only has if been really useful in my Drupal core development and testing, I've been able to watch it get faster and better in that time. But, there is a big difference between me using it on personal projects and using it on a team project with people of varying skill sets. This is where the Bazaar epic failure became evident. There is no good (or even decent) Mac GUI for Bazaar. Read more »

Being hacked sucks. Not only do you have to deal with the shame of being hacked but, it's a lot of work to recover from it well. This month my web server was hacked and someone used about 2 TB (2,000 GB) of outgoing bandwidth to do something shady. My best guess is that some site had a DDOS attack courtesy of my shamed server.

Here is an opportunity for my loss to be your gain. As part of my effort to make it hard for something like this to happen again I've been implementing security solutions to my server and habits. The kinds of things you would hope would be implemented by default by a hosting company but rarely are. Read more »

I've had to use IE 6 for a long time. Spending over 6 years working for a large corporation where everyone used it and now working to build websites that need to function and look good in it. After spending all this time working with and using IE 6 I've come to realize that it's not a bad browser and I can prove it. Read more »

Simple forms on websites are a common feature request. So, when we added a sign-up form to the Geeks and God homepage it was no surprise when I was contacted asking how we did it. Typically, when forms like this are built in Drupal (the CMS powering the site) they are done as a full page. In this case it was just a simple block on the homepage. Here are 3 ways to create a simple block form. Read more »

Wordpress is the top blogging platform. So, when I decided to build this blog I fully expected to use Wordpress and was really looking forward to it. As a full time Drupal developer it's inspiring to use a different tool. This gives me a chance to use a different and refreshing user interface, see under the hood of a different source code, and be inspired in my daily developing.

But, when I looked over my resources and requirements it turns out Wordpress was not the best fit for this site. Since a big part of engineering web applications is starting with the best tools for your task (or at least the best as far as you can tell) here is why I chose Drupal instead of Wordpress. Read more »

Not to long ago I was writing a complex Regular Expression and ran into a rather difficult problem. This was an update to a regular expression in Drupal and needed to be validated before the bug fix could be committed. The problem was that I couldn't find anyone who was comfortable working through the regex with me. This is where the required tests in Drupal saved the day. The tests provided feedback when things failed and eventually validated the expression when it was right so other developers didn't need to. Let me walk through the process of how this worked. Read more »

Since most of use don't get to use Regular Expressions on a regular basis, tools to help us write them can make a huge difference to our sanity. Especially, if your trying to write anything complex that you can't find the solution to with a simple Google search. Here are a few simple tools that may help writing those fun and challenging regex. Read more »

Regular Expressions are one of the most powerful tools in a developers arsenal. Yet, I'm amazed at the number of developers who jump through hoops to avoid using them because they aren't comfortable working with them. I have a simple rule about regular expressions. Every application should use Regular Expressions. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule but I find them to be very rare. I don't mean to say you need to look for uses of Regular Expressions. In most web applications there is a case where they are just the best tool for the job. Read more »