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Managing multiple drupal installations can be a pain. You have to track changes to drupal-core and all the individual modules that you use, as well as managing your own custom modules and your own custom changes to drupal-core. And if if you’re doing this with several different drupal installations it can get inconvenient quickly.

A lot of this hassle can be reduced by installing drupal from cvs rather than installing one of the releases, and by keeping your installation under version control (in this article I use git but you could use any VCS such as mercurial, svn etc).

Here I describe how I manage my drupal installations using the drupal cvs repository and git.

Jason Isbell, singer-songwriter and former member of Drive-by Truckers (one of my most favourite bands), is touring Ireland this week.

• 28/03/2008: Dolans, Limerick (Ireland)
• 29/03/2008: Cyprus Avenue, Cork (Ireland)
• 30/03/2008: Roisin Dubh, Galway (Ireland)
• 01/04/2008: Whelans, Dublin (Ireland)

A few days ago Damien Mulley and Maman Poulet posted that Something.ie was stealing their content. I didn’t pay much attention at the time but at first glance it seemed like they were complaining about their RSS feed being syndicated. RSS feeds are meant to be syndicated - Google and technorati do the same thing right?

Then today, Something.ie published a response making much the same argument. They argue that they are simply syndicating the RSS feed and that they are no different to other aggregators such as Politics in Ireland

I’ve built a few aggregators in the past so, having an interest in this area , I took a closer look. And it seems to me that Something.ie are on the wrong side of what’s acceptable etiquette for aggregating RSS feeds. Here’s why…

There’s a Webcamp on Social Network Portability co-located with Blogtalk in Cork next Sunday, March 2nd. It’s still possible to contribute a talk and or attend at the Webcamp by signing up at the wiki. Webcamps are a bit like Barcamps so this should be good. Check it out if you’re in the area.

One of my favorite rails plugins is exception notifier. This plugin will send you an email whenever an exception is generated by your application. This information includes:

• the request and parameters that caused the exception
• a stack trace
• the contents of the users session.
• the values of all the environment variables

I’ve allowed myself to get distracted lately by too much interruptive information. When you’re coding it can take a while to load the code into your brain and get into the zone where you’re making real progress with it (Paul Graham describes it here). Every time you get interrupted it can be like starting over. It’s easy to get distracted by various communication mediums popping up on your desktop. And a day with with regular interruptions is a day where not a lot of work gets done.

I’ve watched quite a few Google tech talks in the last few months. There are lots available. Here are some of the ones I found interesting (If you have recommendations for good talks that I haven’t listed below please leave a comment).

So a couple of days ago as I was boarding a plane to fly back to Ireland I dropped my powerbook on the runway.

Previous versions of OS X came with apache and php4 installed. To enable it you had to edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

This has changed in Leopard so if you’ve upgraded you need to re-enable php. The location of the apache config file has changed and the installed php module is now php5. The apache configuration is now stored in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.

So to enable php on Leopard, uncomment the line

in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and restart Web Sharing from the System Preferences panel. A by-product of the move from php 4 to 5 is that some of the default options have changed. So you may need to set some of the options to get your application to work. The php.ini file used by this php module is /etc/php.ini

There’s a thread on programming reddit reminding developers that + is a valid character in an email address. So you should make sure that your validations allow for this.