drupal 6 included an upgrade to the built in logging functionality (watchdog). drupal 6 exposes a new hook, hook_watchdog which modules may implement to log Drupal events to custom destinations. it also includes two implementations, the dblog module which logs to the watchdog table, and the syslog module which logs to syslog.

with these upgrades, log4drupal is less critical addition to a drupal install, and i hesitated before providing a drupal 6 upgrade. however, eventually i decided that log4drupal is still a useful addition to a drupal development environment as log4drupal provides the following features still not provided by the upgraded drupal 6 watchdog implementation :

• a java-style stacktrace including file and line numbers, showing the path of execution
• automatic recursive printing of all variables passed to the log methods
• ability to change the logging level on the fly

in addition, the drupal 6 version of log4drupal includes the following upgrades from the drupal 5 version

• all messages sent to the watchdog method are also output via log4drupal
• severity levels have been expanded to confirm to RFC 3164
• log module now loaded during the drupal bootstrap phase so that messages may be added within hook_boot implementations.

you may download the drupal 6 version here. see below for general information on what this module is about and how it works.

installing drupal is pretty easy, but it's even easier if you have a step by step guide. i've written one that will produce a basic working configuration with drupal6 on debian lenny with php5, mysql5 and apache2.

all commands that follow assume that you are the root user.

let's get started!

if you backup your *nix box, eventually you'll get into the business of purging your old backup files to preserve disk space. a reasonable way to do this is to use the find command to identify old backups and delete them. you should, however, consider doing something a little smarter than this.

traffic to a website can be divided into four major sources : direct, paid, organic and referrals. unsurprisingly, google analytics segments the traffic sources reports accordingly.

there is, however, a small catch. the ever growing popularity of search engines has led to an odd use case : users who use a search engine to search for exactly your domain name, instead of simply typing www.mydomain.com into their web browser. these users have just reached your site via an "organic search" and google analytics will classify them accordingly.

technically this is correct, but semantically it's troubling. the users who have reached your site by typing "mydomain" into Google have far more in common with the users that entered www.mydomain.com into their URL bar and far less in common with those users that reached your site by typing "my optimized search term" into Google. and the population of these users is not small - on one of the commercial drupal sites that i maintain these "mydomain" Google searchers account for over one third of the supposedly organic traffic.

before the release of google analytics advanced segments, one could estimate the volume of "True Organic" pageviews by starting with the organic search volume, then using the keyword report to subtract all the "mydomain" keywords (mydomain, mydomain.com, and, my personal favorite www.mydomain.com).

thankfully, advanced segments now gives us an easy way to create a "True Direct" and "True Organic" segment - in which all the "mydomain" organic searches have been removed from the organic segment, and stuck in the direct segment instead.

an unfathomable number of people around the world are hooked on a new(ish) service called twitter, and an equally unfathomable number still have no idea what it is. twitter is . . . a bit hard to explain. one way to think of twitter is as a blog hosting website. however, there is one twist : each entry (called a "tweet") may be no longer than 140 characters. and two unique features, 1) you can send in your blog updates by sending a text message (SMS) to twitter, and 2) your friends can sign up to receive your blog updates on their phones.

to get a better idea what i'm talking about, check out the twitter feed for my crazy husband, or an important person like barack obama. or, check out a few of the many twitter visualizations. twittervision shows some very small percentage of all the tweets received, and where they are coming from. it's best to look at this at an hour of the day when asia is asleep. i also like twistori which shows all incoming tweets containing certain keywords like "wish".

tweets started out in plain text, but it didn't take long for folks to think . . . gosh . .. i'd love to include a snapshot with my random thought of the day . . .and hence was born twitpic. and, of course, there are lots of handy applications to send photo-enabled twitters from your cellphone. i like twitterlator.

how you might use twitter depends on who you are. if you are . . .

• incapable of sending an SMS, or don't know what that is :
  forget it, stay away.


• capable of sending an SMS, but too lazy to setup a blog
  twitter's a great way to join the nation's new favorite pastime - generating as much useless information as quickly as possible.


• a non-technical blogger
  twitter is a great companion to a traditional blog. if you're blogging using a standard blogging technology (wordpress, blogger, etc.) then you can easily add your twitter micro-blog as a sidebar to your regular blog. it's easy, it's fun, and it keeps your blog "fresh" with little effort on your part.


• a geek
  if you have any geeky tendencies, you'll likely rapidly develop a love/hate relationship with twitter. love the platform, hate the implementation. at the very least, you'll capture your tweets and display them (sensibly!) as part of your blog. or, hell, you might write an entire surf conditions report website that uses twitter as its underlying technology.

a while ago i posted some performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud.

amazon have just released ebs, the final piece of technology that makes their ec2 platform really viable for running lamp stacks stuck as drupal.

ebs, the "elastic block store", provides sophisticated storage for your database instance, with features including:

• high io throughput
• data replication
• large storage capacity
• hot backups using snapshots
• instance type portability e.g. quickly swapping your database hardware for a bigger machine.

recently i posted a couple of introductory articles on jmeter, a great apache open-source tool that allows you to measure the performance and scalability of a wide variety of services, especially web-applications.

i wrote these articles because although the online documentation provides reasonable reference material, it doesn't serve well as a jmeter introduction or tutorial.

things have changed a bit since then. the uk-based publishing house packt publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of emily halili's newly published book on jmeter, which is as far as i can tell, is the first book dedicated to the subject.

recently i posted some encouraging performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. while the performance was encouraging, the suitability of this environment for running lamp stacks was not. ec2 had some fundamental issues including a lack of static ip addresses and no viable persistent storage mechanism.

amazon are quickly rectifying these problems, and recently announced elasic ip addresses; a "static" ip address that you own and can dynamically point at any of your instances.

today amazon indicated that persistent storage will soon be available.

three weeks ago, zicasso.com launched a drupal-powered free personalized online travel service that aims to connect travelers to a global network of quality, pre-screened travel companies. unlike many internet travel sites which provide cheap fares or packages, zicasso is targeted for busy, discerning travelers who want to plan and book complex trips (the ones with multiple destination stops or activities).

zicasso was favorably reviewed in popular web publications including; pc magazine, techcrunch, ars technica and the san jose business journal.

zicasso chose to build their application using the open-source cms system, drupal to leverage the wide array of web2.0 functionality provided by the open source community.

the application was rapidly constructed by a small development team led by cailin nelson and jenny dickinson. the team took advantage of "core" drupal modules including cck, panels, views, imagecache, workflow and actions.

backups are boring, but we all know how important they are. backups can also be quite powerful when working with xen virtualization, since xen allows for convenient back-up and restore of entire systems.

i've recently been working on a flexible, general-purpose script enabling incremental backups of complete xen guests, optimized for secure, distributed environments; xenBackup. if you're working with xen, you might find it useful.

the xenBackup script leverages open-source components like ssh, rsync, and rdiff-backup to create a simple, efficient and functional solution.