Best Of

Yesterday, my Orphaned Works article hit the front page of Reddit, a popular social news site. Traffic instantly increased by a factor of more than 20. At peak, the site was serving over 30 requests a second, enough to take down most poorly configured Drupal sites. In this article, I'll show you how I survived, and what steps you can take to make sure your site is ready for the Reddit Effect.

These first 2 tips will give you the quickest bang-for-your-buck, and based on my research, more than half of new Drupal sites fail to take advantage of them!

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Learning Drupal 6 Module Development is a new book from Packt Publishing, written by Matt Butcher. The book is aimed at Drupal users who know PHP and want to learn module development.

I was one of the Technical Reviewers for this book, so I've had a digital copy for a while, but my final hard copy just arrived today, and I must say, it's quite cool to see my name in print! :)

This book will take you through building several different modules, linking them together through hooks, and finally, creating an install profile to incorporate them all into a distributable package. Along the way, you'll find lots of useful tips, and links to relevant topics on Drupal.org.

If you're looking to learn module development, and your focus is Drupal 6, I definitely recommend picking up a copy.

You can grab a sample chapter here (1.3M PDF).

Update: I'm giving away a free copy of this book to the person who writes the best review over at Drupal Modules.

Wondering just how fast Drupal 6 is? So was I, so I set up a quick Drupal 6 demo site on another domain of mine, and generated a bunch of random content using the Devel module. The site has a mix of 1000 pages and stories, most of which have 5 comments and 5 taxonomy terms assigned to them. Full caching and compression is enabled. Clean URLs are working and I'm using the default .htaccess file.

Give it a test run, I think you'll be impressed with the speed. The demo is hosted on the same AN Hosting account as this site, so if you like what you see, I recommend checking them out.

The ultimate guide to writing advanced .htaccess files!

Got a spambot or scraper constantly showing up in your server logs? Or maybe there's another site that's leeching all your bandwidth? Perhaps you just want to ban a user from a certain IP address? In this article, I'll show you how to use .htaccess to do all of that and more!

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Drupal's clean URLs give it a good reputation when it comes to SEO, but there's a lot more you can do under the hood to improve Drupal's search engine friendliness. Today I will show you some Drupal SEO tips to help you avoid duplicate content and boost your search engine ranking.

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Is your Drupal site slow? Are you losing traffic because of high load times? Your database could be the problem. Read on to find out why your site is lagging, and see how the right server configuration can speed it up.

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