Fenix Blog

HTML5 has certainly been making the rounds in the news lately. With Apple’s on-going PR campaign against Adobe’s Flash technology, comes mounting misconceptions about what exactly HTML5 is, what it can do, and what it means for end-users.

I hope to clarify several of the most glaring misconceptions over the next few posts. Today I’d like to focus on the most publicized and misunderstood issue of HTML5 video.
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When people think of open source, the things that immediately come to mind are products and tools that many consider to be polar opposites of Microsoft offerings.

Firefox vs Internet Explorer
Linux vs Windows
Apache vs IIS
PHP vs ASP.NET
MySQL vs MS SQL
Open Office vs Microsoft Office

If you run an organization that heavily relies on Microsoft technologies like Windows Server and Microsoft SQL, you may immediately assume this means you’re out of luck unless you’re willing to invest in open source web infrastructure – the most popular of which is known as the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.

Luckily this is no longer true. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a search I monitor in my Twitter client for “drupal“. As the awareness of the tool grows in traditional and new media (especially following the high-profile relaunch of whitehouse.gov), the relative backlash in the feed is startling.

I don’t really blame people, though. Drupal probably isn’t for them, and drupal.org and most Drupal advocates are doing a terrible job of setting expectations. So much so that I feel this trend of pushing Drupal onto everyone for everything is hurting Drupal’s reputation and perception. Read the rest of this entry »

As anyone who has developed a Drupal site with devel module‘s query logging on can tell you, a Drupal implementation can quickly get out of control when it comes to hammering the database. Personally, I’ve seen Drupal run well over 300 queries to render a single page. In a hosting setup where the bottlenecks exist at the memory usage and MySQL levels (which refers to nearly all non-dedicated hosting packages), this can quickly become a problem.

I’ve summarized a series of simple setup and configuration tips behind the jump that can help any site running Drupal 6.x improve performance and the subsequent user experience as a result. Read the rest of this entry »

As any software developer will tell you, there’s a limit to the number of times you can hack on a codebase before it’s no longer sustainable. When a piece of software, protocol, or standard of some kind is conceived, it is done with assumptions in mind. These assumptions ultimately lead to limitations, and those limitations ultimately necessitate the need to come up with clever workarounds or, in the worst case scenario – hacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Picking up a new framework can be as difficult (and sometimes moreso) as learning an entire computer language.  On the drupal end of things, the community has yielded all sorts of time-saving tools that you can use to get up and running without even having to get your hands dirty with code.  We’ve whipped up a short list of modules we commonly use and that have saved us considerable time. Read the rest of this entry »