Jim Drash

I use Webmin to automate much of the day to day drudgery associated with managing the underlying Linux system that supports this site. Webmin has been around for a very long time and is a very reliable tool for system administrators. One of the things that all system administrators have to worry about is doing database and file system backups. Webmin provides easy forms to creating these.

I am the de facto IT person for an "HOA" for some vacation homes.. I have been hosting the HOA's website in my house and have recently moved it to Amazon Web Services. The site is powered by the same tools that I use here: Drupal, LAMP, and Picasa Web Albums. We are using LoginRadius to make it easy to get into the site using a socal media login like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, or Yahoo.

I have enable Browscap and the Mobile Theme modules and have added a mobile so the site works on Android, iPhone, Window Mobile, etc.

I have enabled Google Chrome Frame support on this web site. Google Chrome Frame is an Internet Explorer add-in that will allow the content of a site to be displayed in IE using the Chrome rendering engine. This provides access to newer items in HTML to work in IE 8 and below.

More information go here: https://developers.google.com/chrome/chrome-frame/

I just finished reading Drupal for Dummies. This was a very useful book. The book did a good job of providing basic Drupal knowledge without being too simplistic or too technical. I was able to use the knowledge in the book to add significant functionality to my personal web page. I read this as a Kindle edition and regularly used the Kindle Cloud Reader for Chrome to flip back and forth between the text and the pages I was editing.

I have been using ddclient to keep my IP address correct. I have been a ZoneEdit subscriber but now with their problems, I have decided to use cloudflare as my primary provider. I got the new ddclient code that supports cloudflare but since it is an https site I need a bunch more code that I can't seem to put my hands on. I am just going to run a bash script that will check my IP every 5 minutes in a cron and update cloudflare if I need to. Way more simple. This just works.

I can't say enough good things about cloudflare.

I set up a Google Analytics account and enabled it via cloudflare. I did not have to change any page on my this web site. Very cool. Again, lots to learn.

I have moved the jimdrash.com web site to an Amazon Web Services micro instance running Drupal 7. I have moved the authoritative DNS server to cloudflare for the security and speed they can provide. So far so good.

This is a chance to try stuff out and see how things work in this world. Lots of learning to do but I like what I see so far.