SysAdmin's Journey
Using Git Submodules with Dynamic Puppet Environments
February 6, 2012: There comes a point in the lifecycle of every Puppet setup where you realize that you're going to be much better off utilizing other peoples' Puppet modules whenever possible. It's what makes OSS great -- why should I reinvent the wheel when I can help make your wheel even better? I've found what I think is a very productive setup -- it leverages Git (specifically branches, submodules, and hooks), Gitolite permissions, and Puppet environments to create a workflow that a team of admins can use to iterate over new features on without disturbing each other. Read more...
VPS.net review
November 14, 2011: I've been running a single node from VPS.net for about a year now. Please note that my specific experience has been in their "Chicago Zone D data center", but if you check out their status page or search Twitter, you'll find a lot of others having the same issues. While there's a lot of good things to write about, where they fail is the most important area to me - availabilty Read more...
It's not you, it's me: Call for Node Gallery co-maintainers
October 19, 2011: There's only a certain amount of bandwidth in a person's day. As you get older, that bandwidth seems to become more and more constrained. Kids are extreme bandwidth hogs. Over the years I've found that I have enough bandwidth in my life to deal with one obsession that's not part of my day job at any given time. For the last couple years, that obsession has been with Drupal and specifically with Node Gallery. Read more...
Drupal on Heroku
September 21, 2011: Heroku has been around for awhile now, but has been primarily a rails host. Well, until recently anway. With the announcement of their Facebook integration, many others have noted that *any* PHP app can at least parse on Heroku’s cedar stack. Read more...
Selecting the right CDN for YOUR website
April 19, 2011: At one of my jobs, we recently went through the process of selecting a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for our site. While the first rule of CDN's is that "any CDN is better than no CDN", it can be argued that certain CDN's are a better fit in certain situation than others. Read more...
Lead SysAdmin position available
April 6, 2011: There's a blog post to follow with when/why, etc., but without further ado: I'm moving to a new position at Buckle, and that means we need a new Lead SysAdmin. Read more...
Case Study in Migrating XML to Drupal using Migrate
July 14, 2010: I've had the great fortune to be able to be part of a migration to Drupal which exposed me to migrate and friends. Read more...
My Thoughts and Ramblings on DrupalConSF 2010
April 23, 2010: I had the great pleasure of attending my first DrupalCon this week. Read more...
2010: What a Year!
April 20, 2010: What a year it's been... Read more...
Ask SAJ: Any SA's at DrupalConSF?
April 18, 2010: It snuck up on me so fast, I forgot to ask - are any of my SysAdmin's Journey readers going to San Franciso for DrupalCon? Read more...