You may have a website packed with great information although if search engine spiders can't crawl your site, your results may show up lower in the results listings, or not at all. A properly configured robots.txt is one key that can help make sure your site is properly crawled and help boost your search engine ranking. Some module configurations can cause the crawling of improper results, duplication, or endless looping.

Heres a listing of the top 20 ugliest websites still living on the Internet. I can't believe that these sites were never removed or redesigned. Number 19 claims to be a web design company. Go figure. There are probably more, but I got a kick out of this listing.

• Ugliest Websites Collection

I've been doing some research and testing with Drupal measuring performance and scalability. Drupal has built in CSS and JavaScript aggregation (now in D6) to minimize the number of http requests, and caching via the database. In some cases with a high amount of traffic caching with the database is not enough. Modules like Cache Router allow the site caching to be handled by an engine other than the database to increase performance for larger amounts of traffic.

I needed a tool to load test a website I was working on that I knew was going to have a large amount of traffic. In the past I used Apache Benchmark, but I needed a little bit more extensive load testing plan. I found JMeter to be great solution that is quite powerful and extensible, although it has somewhat of a learning curve. I followed the basic directions in the JMeter documentation and created a basic load test for X number of simultaneous connections.

I needed a programatic way to deploy and install Drupal sites using an installation profile. I  found that I could use an automated installation profile to create new sites with basic customization rather quickly. I wanted to take this one step further to automate the installation process programatically. Drupal 5 makes creating automated install profiles straitforeward.

I was looking for a way to customize the Drupal node edit pages for specific content types and I found this article from Lullabot. It gives a great overview of the different ways to customize or override the core Drupal form fields. I used this to modify an node edit page to create a simplified version of the form for less technical users so they would not feel overwhelmed with the many customizable options that Drupal provides for a node.

I was excited more effort going into Drupal command line tools. In the past I’ve had to develop my own tools for deployment and updating Drupal on the command line. Drupal currently has limited tools for the command line in versions 5 and 6. I’m not sure about 7, hopefully it will be better. This Acquia blog post offers a collection of scripts to help deploy and maintain Drupal sites as well as some other features. Thanks Acquia!

I posted some photos of the electric motorcycle. We removed the engine from a 1987 Honda motorcycle and replaced it with 16 - 12 volt batteries and a 10 HP brushless electric motor.

I ran into a problem with one of my python scripts the other day and noticed from the Apache logs that it was causing a segfault somewhere. This is the first time I have had to deal with a segfault in a web based application so I looked around for a debugging solution. I found that mod_python has has a flag that will trigger Apache to start a console running PDB. In order to get this working, “PythonEnablePdb On” needs to be added to the Apache config for the site running the Mod_python script and Apache needs to be ran with the following command.

apache2ctl -DONE_PROCESS


Well, we finally ordered the hardware that will be controlling the GUI display and interact with the electronics on the motorcycle. We decided to go with the ALIX.1C.

The motherboard comes with the following features: