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I've been thinking a lot about how coders use keyboards, given that they weren't specifically designed for writing code, and yet we are some of the heaviest users around. I ran some frequency analysis on a Drupal installation to see how often certain characters occur in the source code. Specifically, I was looking at non-letter characters (specials and numbers). The code that does this is available as a simple drush command. …

I was unable to co-present at DrupalCon San Francisco due to a volcanic ash cloud that prevented anyone from flying out of London for a week, so David Strauss did my part, along with Eric Baumes (CTO of The Economist). Thanks to archive.org, the presentation is available and you can see David doing an amazing job presenting our work. Presentation Session on Archive.org …

We enountered a strange issue yesterday with a mysterious disappearing cookie. It turned out that an invalid favicon.ico link was causing the issue. The Drupal CDN module rewrites the favicon link to be served from media.economist.com: <?php <link rel="shortcut icon" href= "http://media.economist.com/sites/all/themes/econ/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> ?> The CDN, however, wasn't configured to serve .ico files, so it was issuing a redirect to http://www.economist.com (the home page). That caused weirdness with the favicon in general, although sometimes it would appear depending on the user's browser. …

David Strauss and I are presenting the load testing work our team did at The Economist. Here's a link to the session information. UPDATE: I was unable to attend the conference, as all flights were cancelled following the volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull :< I made a follow-up post here: Performance Testing Drupal …

The company I'm currently working for is called Digital People, a creative agency based in London. We make exclusively Drupal-based sites, which normally showcase the results of market research, and increasingly act as portals into the research departments of large companies. We develop using a Subversion-based workflow. Here's a great article by Nick Sergeant which closely approximates our current development practices. At this point, it should be noted that the codebase we both have checked out is from ‘trunk’. …

The Drupal coding standards docs are a great reference for developers, but there's also an automated way of checking your code: the Coder module. Here's how it works: 1. Install Copy to sites/all/modules and enable the usual way. Now you have a new link in Navigation: 2. Choose reviews Click that link, then select exactly what you want the Coder module to do on this page: 3. Targets Select what you'd like to review, there are many different options: …