In 2011, I left my job as the web developer for the Archdiocese of St. Louis to join Flocknote , and help build Flocknote into a great communications tool for churches, ministries, teams and organizations.

I've worked with some great people at Flocknote (hi Matt, Barrett, Kait, Derek, LCM staff et all!), and have enjoyed the challenge of building a major web application on top of Drupal 7. Flocknote was built back when Drupal 7 was in the 7.1

Apache is the venerable old-timer in the http server world. There are many younger siblings like Nginx , Lighttpd , and even Node.js , which are often touted as being faster, lighter, and more scalable alternatives than Apache.

Though many alternatives are more lightweight and can be faster in certain circumstances, Apache offers many benefits (not the least of which is abundant documentation and widespread support) and is still a top-notch web server that can

Legacy code—warts and all—isn't such a bad thing.

If it's built well, and maintained well, it probably takes care of the hundreds/thousands of edge cases with which your beautifully-rewritten new codebase doesn't yet cope.

Unless it's not well-documented (or self-documented), or incompatible with modern systems, it's often a better idea to refactor and clean up old code than to scrap a system entirely and rewrite from

If you accuse someone of hating you (or someone else) for simply disagreeing with you (or someone else) on an issue (whether it be the best baseball team, iPhone or Android, the best candy bar, or—gasp—same-sex marriage), please look up the definition of hate, and its synonyms in a thesaurus.

Disagreement ≠ hate.

tl;dr : The iPhone microphone I've been waiting for, just a little more expensive than I'd hoped!

[ Note : You can win a FREE smartLav, courtesy of Server Check.in (an awesome website monitoring service) , by posting a comment on this blog post .]

For a long time, I've carried around an Audio-Technica ATR-3350 lavalier mic and a special adapter (TRS to TRRS) that allows

I love finding little gems like this: The Story of the PING Program .

The best ping story I've ever heard was told to me at a USENIX conference, where a network administrator with an intermittent Ethernet had linked the ping program to his vocoder program, in essence writing:

ping goodhost | sed -e 's/.*/ping/' | vocoder

He wired the vocoder's output into his office stereo and turned up the volume as loud as he could stand. The computer sat there shouting

tl;dr : Excellent modern security system that's relatively easy to set up, and is almost infinitely expandable.

I was recently in the market for a home security system, and the two top contenders for me were the GE Simon XT and the Honeywell Lynx Touch 5100 systems.

I liked both of these systems for a few reasons:

1. They were sold in low-cost prepackaged kits, with everything needed to set up a basic home security system.
2. They

My Grandpa Geerling was a very ordinary man. He lived in a simple split-level with a loving wife, and raised nine children while working at a union job.

He loved golf, he loved tools, he loved his children, grandchildren, and more recently, great grandchildren. He had a strong faith that he proclaimed in word and deed throughout his life to all his friends and family— even especially when they needed it most.

He drank Bud Light, and always had golf, racing, football

Remember to help get #ThanksPontifex trending today at 1:45 p.m. CST!

At this year's DrupalCon, I'm excited to hear about everything going on with Drupal 8, as we're nearing the end of the development cycle, and a