Honeypot makes an appearance on the Modules Unraveled podcast
I've been subscribed to the Modules Unraveled podcast since somewhere around episode 40, and it's one of my favorite Drupal-oriented podcasts. I was thrilled to get an email from Brian Lewis last week asking if I'd talk about Honeypot (a popular Drupal module I maintain) on the podcast.
We discussed the module itself, ways to combat spam in general, some reasons why you would or would not want to use Honeypot for your particular site, and also the experience of porting the module
Speaking at php[tek] in St. Louis May 25 and 26!
![php[tek] 2016 logo](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/speaking-phptek-st-louis-may-25-and-26/phptek-2016-logo.png){kind=logo}
I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be delivering two sessions at php[tek] this year:
Both topics are near and dear to me, as I've had more time to refine the Ansible roles and performance of Drupal 8 on a Raspberry Pi (see Drupal Pi and the Raspberry Pi Dramble website for more info), and I've also been spending some time lately optimizing my WFH environment (the
Configuring CloudFlare with Drupal 8 to protect the Pi Dramble
In a prior post on the constraints of in-home website hosting , I mentioned one of the major hurdles to serving content quickly and reliably over a home Internet connection is the bandwidth you get from your ISP. I also mentioned one way to mitigate the risk of DoSing your own home Internet is to use a CDN and host images externally.
At this point, I have both of those things set up for www.pidramble.com (a Drupal 8 site hosted on a cluster of Raspberry Pis in my basement!
Drupal VM's latest update adds Redis, PHP-FPM support to Apache
tl;dr : Drupal VM 2.2.0 'Wormhole' was released today, and it adds even more features for local dev!
Over the past few months, I've been working towards a more reliable release cadence for Drupal VM, and I've targeted one or two large features, a number of small improvements, and as many bugfixes as I have time to review. The community surrounding Drupal VM's development has been amazing; in the past few months I've noticed:
Podcast interview with Len Epp on the LeanPub podcast
Today LeanPub published it's 25th episode of the LeanPub Podcast , and in it, Len Epp asked me about a wide range of topics, including AI, the impact of smartphones on interpersonal relationships, how I got started in computing, and how I self-published a bestseller, Ansible for DevOps , on LeanPub.
A few decent quotes from the interview:
[On how I learned technical/tutorial writing:] Go sit down, sit through all the tutorials, and then write up a guide that
A good use for a Raspberry Pi - Missile Control
My brother gave me what will likely be one of the best useless-but-oh-so-fun gifts everâa Dream Cheeky Thunder USB foam missile launcher.
The launcher can be used with an extremely boorish app for Mac or Windows... or you can control it with some basic USB communication! I've found a few projects which allow the launcher to be controlled via any OS with Python fairly easily:
- stormLauncher - A basic Python script that allows command-line usage.
- Retaliation -
Hello, World! (For the thousandth time)
This is yet another 'hello, world' post on yet another personal blog. I've used static site generators, hosted services, Drupal, Wordpress, and a plethora of other platforms for blogs through the years, but I'm finally looking forward to consolidating everything âfrom every blog I've consistently writtenâin this one central blog. Hopefully I'll be able to do so while preserving URLs and images, as most of the data I have is at least structured and
Always getting X-Drupal-Cache: MISS? Check for messages
I spent about an hour yesterday debugging a Varnish page caching issue. I combed the site configuration and code for anything that might be setting cache to 0 (effectively disabling caching), I checked and re-checked the /admin/config/development/performance settings, verifying the 'Expiration of cached pages' ( page_cache_maximum_age ) had a non-zero value and that the 'Cache pages for anonymous users' checkbox was checked.
After scratching my head a while, I realized that the
Benchmarking PHP 7 vs HHVM - Drupal and Wordpress
[ Multiple updates : I've added results for concurrencies of 1 and 10, results on bare metal vs. VMware instances, tested Drupal 8 vs Drupal 7 vs Wordpress 4.4, and I've also retested every single benchmark at least twice! Please make sure you're read through the entire post prior to contesting these benchmark results!]
tl;dr : Always test your own application, and trust, but verify every benchmark you see. PHP 7 is actually faster than HHVM in many cases
Use Vagrant 1.8's new ansible_local provisioner for Ansible provisioning
I build a lot of local development VMs in a typical week, and need to support Ansible provisioning on Mac, Linux, and Windows workstations (with or without Ansible installed)â Vagrant 1.8.0 was an early Christmas gift for me!
In the past, when I wanted to build a Vagrantfile to provision a VM using an Ansible playbook, I added the following, which used the JJG-Ansible-Windows shell script to install Ansible inside the VM, install role dependencies, and run a