Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!
15 September 2010
websites
SEO
How to
Drupal
How do you find "all" the Drupal sites that Google knows about?
A post on drupal.org suggests Add New Comment, but that wont be entirely accurate. So far I have come up with a search that lists all sites with a User Account page on user/login:
intitle:"User account" inurl:"user/login"
15 September 2010
geek
free
Drupal
cool
Did anyone else get a Drupal EyeGrow (or Druplipets as they seem to be known) from DrupalCon CPH?
I started growing mine around a week ago and, as you can see, it's coming on pretty well!
01 July 2010
Quicksilver
OS X
mac
Apple
I just wanted to quickly setup a reminder on my mac (in this case that Star Trek was on in ten minutes - I know, I'm a geek!). It dawned on me that I didn't know a way to do this off the top of my head.
After a little Googling and trial and error, I found that the awesome Quicksilver could execute timed events!
It's a little convoluted, however here is the process...
14 April 2010
Drupal
performance
tips
I use a cron script on this server which fires up Drush to run Cron (rather than the standard wget method). There is nothing wrong with using wget, however it does tie up an apache or lighttpd process while cron is running. It also means it's harder to control process priority. Drush, on the other hand, runs in CLI mode, so controlling process priority is easier (using nice). But then I started seeing odd errors…
04 March 2010
programming
linux
How to
geek
Drupal
apache
Following Kevin Hankens post on why you shouldn't ignore Drupal 404 errors, I decided to go through yesterdays error_log on our live apache server (the one which hosts www.pponline.co.uk, www.sportbusiness.com and www.mychild.co.uk alongside around 40 other dupral sites).
24 February 2010
tips
programming
performance
How to
Drupal
I run XCache on the server that powers this site. XCache is cool. Out of the box, it allows caching of PHP compile code in memory, after all once a file is compile you shouldn't keep needing to compile it on every page load, should you?
17 February 2010
tip
mysql
geek
Drupal
Today I needed to quickly find out a list of node's which did not contain a certain token (one we use on PPOnline to insert adverts into articles). There were meant to be 2 of these tokens per article but we had noticed some only had one. Some didn't have any at all!
Now, this might already exist as a neat function somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So I wrote this little query to find the number of occurrences of a substring in a larger block of text.
I did look into using the SUBSTRING() and SUBSTRING_INDEX() commands, however I couldn't see a way of efficiently using them to find any number of occurrences. So I settled on the following…
22 January 2010
security
linux
geek
Has anyone every tried to generate a GPG (or GnuPG) key? I have… and I received this error…
Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 284 more bytes)
14 November 2009
performance
How to
geek
Drupal
A while ago we started having issues running a website. Bandwidth. Upon investigation, we saw that the majority of bandwidth was being use by image files and of those, lot was from the ImageCache folder. It was also causing a lot of excess server load by consuming Apache processes. Something needed to be done.
18 August 2009
vim
programming
Drupal
I recently stumbled across a handy tutorial on configuring a Drupal dictionary in Vim for autocomplete. I also remembered helping a friend out with a similar problem, Drupal syntax highlighting for Nano. I then combined the two and have a simple to follow tutorial for generating your own drupal 6 dictionary for vim autocomplete!