Web Design

There are many different techniques for preventing form spam on your website, and an important component of the battle against spam is your constant struggle between giving your 'real' users a good experience while preventing spammers and automated bots from spamming you and lowering the quality of the content on your website.

Drupal is a scalable, flexible, and open source content management system that is built to run on a variety of server architectures. The only real requirement is that PHP runs on your system. You can run Linux, Microsoft, Mac OS X, etc., along with Apache, IIS, nginx, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. if you're willing to do a few extra things.

However, the overwhelming majority of Drupal websites use the most popular LAMP stack on the backend: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. This white paper (which is a living document – I'll be updating it as time progresses) provides my thoughts on performance considerations for Drupal on a LAMP stack, but this information can be used for pretty much any system on any server, if you look at the basic principles.

Sections:

1. Front End Performance
2. Drupal Performance
3. Apache Performance
4. PHP Performance
5. MySQL Performance
6. Linux/Server Tuning
7. Disaster/Data Recovery
8. Other Tuning/Expanding Horizontally

First - Front End Performance

HTML, CSS, Images and JavaScript

These three technologies rule the web. Almost everything worth doing on the web involves these three languages at some point. There are a ton of things you can do to speed up your website by simply looking at the code generated by your website that reaches the end-user—in fact, you should do this before even thinking about looking at the LAMP stack.

From time to time, there is a very disobedient/annoying computer or set of computers that annoy the heck out of me online—usually by attempting to bring down one of my websites, or by trying to access hundreds of vulnerable locations (which makes my server return a bunch of 404s) on my server.

For information on different IPs, I use the online IP information lookup tool at robtex.

About a week ago, a road near my condo was closed off due to construction. Prominent signs were placed at three separate junctions warning drivers to take a detour. Judging by these signs, a rational individual would get the hint and turn right, avoiding any unnecessary danger to his life or his vehicle.

Unfortunately, users (and drivers) are NOT rational when it comes to most decisions. They have a goal, and they'll do whatever they think is best to achieve that goal, whether or not it's allowed, legal, and/or rational.

Now that I have effectively replaced my laptop with an iPad, I need an easy/quick way to post a photo or two from my iPad to my blog. I use Photogene as a simple Photoshop replacement on the iPad (it actually works pretty well, for being limited to 256 MB of RAM and a 1024x768 display).

After having built out many themes for Drupal 6 (and a couple for Drupal 5), I'm going to start from scratch on a couple designs and build a theme in Drupal 7, which will be released sometime in 2010. I'll take you along my journey in this article.

Please note, this article is a work in progress, and I'll be updating it as I go. Hopefully, within a couple weeks, I'll have the article complete, and a nice new theme to release on Drupal.org (maybe), only for Drupal 7.