We use Akismet to filter out the spam that’s posted in the form of comments here at likethatidea.com. The photo below was taken by me a few months ago and I assure you that no altering of the photo was done. I’ll let you be the judge whether the spam comments are really evil or not.
Besides using Akismet for our Wordpress sites, we also use it for our Drupal sites. Akismet seems to work well for both content management systems.? Click here if you digg it!
I originally posted the below discussion at CMS Report. While the discussion isn’t typical for this site, I still felt it worthy to be posted here. Sorry if it’s too “geeky” for some of our more casual readers…but once a geek, always a geek.
I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how much education or how little education you have. If your profession is in information technology (IT), you and I share the same exact thoughts, questions, and even dread toward this particular topic. The topic is user surveys.
What am I talking about, you ask? Ok, picture yourself arriving to work and finding “it” in your inbox at the entrance of your cubicle. Let’s go even further, you’re the one that placed the survey in everyone’s inbox and now the time has arrived to collect the paperwork, tally the results, and draw conclusions for the project that you are working on. At this moment, reflect on your thoughts and frame of mind while you hold those surveys in your hands. We all have that same creepy voice in our heads asking us the question, “Do these user surveys hold any real value?” The voice demands an answer.
When the days are less crazy, we’ll write more about a sister site of ours, the CMS Report. The site is still in it’s iniitial stages with content somewhat limited. The site currently provides content through a news aggregator and an occasional original article. The theme also needs some work. For now though, we’ll just say if you have an interest in web content management systems you’ll likely find something that interests you.
The site covers most open source projects including Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, Wordpress, etc. Also covered is the propriety side of CMS. In the near-future, discussion will also include the broader topics of information systems and system adminstration.
CMS Report currently runs on Drupal 4.7. While CMS Report will allow for comments and submission of articles, it is not expected to introduce a forum-type format. If you like forums, we recommend another CMS-focused site we are associated with…the WebCMS Forum.
Here at Like that Idea we have spent quite a bit of time talking about Web content management systems, with one of our favorites being Drupal. You may have wondered who actually uses these open source applications and how good could something you download for free really be? Dries Buytaert, the project leader for Drupal, pointed out on is blog that:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is using Drupal for their Academy of Program / Project and Engineering Leadership website (APPEL). Sweet!
Some well known (and not so well known ) Drupal sites also includes: American Idol’s Blog, Mac Geekery, Nashville News, Ringo Starr, Anthropology.net, Fish Fever, and Empire Investor. Ok, to be fair, Empire Investor is a site we did for a client…but if the site’s owner is happy with Drupal why wouldn’t you be happy with the CMS? If you want more examples of Drupal sites, check out DrupalSites.net and Drupal Showcase.
This is a classic case of constantly learning something new about computers. In fact for those that know more, if you see any mistakes in what I have to say here…feel free to comment and correct me!
A few days ago I mentioned that we optimized the Virtual Private Server that Like that Idea runs on with Zend Optimizer. We didn’t see many improvements, but I think that I made the mistake in assuming what the optimizer did and didn’t do. From my online readings it appears that the Zend Optimizer works best for those applications encoded on a Zend platform (something we do not have). So I went looking elsewhere and found the open source application, eAccelerator.
eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.
I installed eAccelerator from the source on the Apache server. Although not as easy as installing the Zend Optimizer, any Web administrator or computer geek worth his or her grain of salt shouldn’t run into any problems installing eAccelerator. Wow, what a difference! Since the install, the server has been running very well and I think everyone should notice the improvements this time around. The VPS contains a variety of Wordpress, Drupal, and SMF sites…and they all are performing well. If I have a need in the future I’ll bring back the Zend Optimizer since eAccelerator is suppose to be compatible with Zend Optimizer.
Why are we seeing eAccelerator perform so much better than the Zend Optimizer? As the product’s name says, Zend Optimizer is an optimizer for your Web Server.? The eAccelerator package on the other hand is not only an optimizer, but also an accelerator, encoder, and caches the dynamic content (like the pages you see here at this site). So we’re not only seeing the CPU work less because of the code being optimized, but we are also seeing less hits to the database on the server because of the caching. In essence, the server is providing pages faster to our readers but having to work less in providing those pages.
Documentation and support for eAccelerator is rather weak, so I can see why those needing more dependable support may want to purchase the Zend products.? However, so far for this little ‘ol VPS from Dakota Hosting is keeping us happy. If we run into problems with eAccelerator or the VPS I’ll let everyone know. Otherwise, this is the last computer geek article for awhile and we return to normal programming. It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a book review or product recommendation for the family…one of the original purposes of this site.
We host Like that Idea and WebCMS Forum through Dakota Hosting on one of their Virtual Dedicated Servers (also known as Virtual Private Servers or VPS). Dakota Hosting’s normal hosting plans have always been optimized for php using Zend Optimizer. However with the virtual as well as dedicated servers you manage the servers yourself and have to install the “extras” yourself. By default the self-managed server does not come with an optimizer for PHP. So today we loaded the free Zend Optimizer. Hopefully, visitors to our site will notice some performance improvements. Although we haven’t had problems before…occasionally our articles get some broader online attention than normal and we like to be ready for those busy periods.
Installing Zend Optimizer was probably the easiest thing we’ve done so far on our server. Put it this way, it was a lot easier to install the optimizer than installing Wordpress or Drupal (both of which are not too difficult to install either). If you have a server you manage yourself, you can get the Zend Optimizer at Zend’s Website. We found a good but dated explanation of how the optimizer works in a publication called New Architect.
We would like to hear from our regular readers if they notice any improvements since we installed the optimizer. We’re always looking at different solutions for tweaking the server! Any additional suggestions for improving performance are also welcomed.
We had great intentions to continue to keep everyone up to date on a new site that we’re building using Drupal, a content management system (CMS). The idea was as we were building the site we intended to write down how we did it so others could learn with us. Well if you look at our Drupal blog here at Like that Idea you would see that we have not had too many posts in the blog. Have we given up on the idea? No hardly, we are just so busy with other projects (including the project of raising a family) that we have had to prioritize and put some of our ideas on the back burner.
I have no doubt the new site focusing on content management systems will eventually be up and running, the question is when and not if it will happen. I suspect that once Drupal 4.7 has been released is when we’ll start working on the site.
In the meantime, We would like to recommend a few places that you can go to learn about Drupal and other content management systems. First, if you haven’t visited the handbooks at Drupal.org lately, you should. A lot of changes have been taking place in the user support documentation at Drupal.org and most of it is for the better. If reading isn’t your thing, Drupal users don’t have to wait for the movie to come out since it is now available at Lullabot. Lullabot is providing both audiocasts and videocasts on a number of Drupal topics. The Lullabot video for managing menus and links with Drupal is very well done.
Last but not least, if you have questions about content management systems and how they can help you build a Website; please consider joining in on the discussions at our sister site, the WebCMS Forum. While most people think of a Web content management system as only Web Portals, the forum also considers software that manages blogs, forums, shopping carts, and photo-galleries to also be variations of a CMS. WebCMS Forum is still a new site, but it already has had a promising start with a number of users of different CMS applications coming together to share their ideas and learning from others. I already find myself learning a lot and like to see it when those from Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, e107, SMF, phpBB, Wordpress, osCommerce, and others express their thoughts and ideas on their own favorite CMS. I you don’t mind me saying it, I hope you like that forum!