Internet

Paulo Coelho speaks at the Digital, Life, Design in Munich. He tells of how pirating his own book increased sales in Russia from 1,000 copies per year to more than a million copies. His most interesting point, though, is that "the blessing of the internet is increased human contact." Tim Harford echoes this in chapter seven of his book, The Logic of Life. It's become clear that rather than causing people to be come isolated, the internet actively encourages more human contact.

Drupal can be a pain. After a whole day of development, we started getting 'Access Denied' errors on all content that should be accessible by the anonymous user. The cause turned out to be something to do with a module incorrectly altering the node_access table.

Running this query fixed it:

A lecture by Neil Daswani, a Google security engineer and author of “Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know“

Joel Spolsky on the myth of web standards, IE 8 and pragmatists vs. idealists.

Fluidesign on why you don't always have to cram content above the fold when designing websites: Demystifying “Above the Fold”

We've recently been asked by a client to look into creating a Drupal installation that can cope with heavy load. Here's some useful instructions from johnandcailin.com.

I'll post a follow-up in the near future explaining what we ended up doing and how successful it was.

• Scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites

PHP (or non-ASP) developers: if you ever need to create a redirect script on an IIS server using ASP, just create a file called 'index.asp' or 'default.asp' and add the following line: