Well the weekend is over and DrupalCamp Toronto 2008 has come and gone. Thanks to the amazing group of volunteers and presenters, we managed to feed, clothe, and entertain approximately 150 geeks for two whole days with 26 different sessions ranging from theming and jQuery, to implementing Drupy, that is Drupal in Python. Thanks to the fine folks at The Faculty of Information Studies who helped me run around booking rooms, projectors, arranging furniture and access the the building over the weekend.

And more importantly, thanks to the folks who presented sessions and all those who attended! Without interesting material and interested attendees, the weekend would have been a write off. I'm already looking forward to DrupalCamp Toronto 2009, we'll have to start planning early in the spring to outdo this year's effort.

I had a little time over the weekend and got around to converting the site's backend database from MySQL to PostgreSQL, something I've been meaning to do for a while.

Now the odd thing I found was that using PostgreSQL made the site consistently faster. Odd, considering MySQL is generally held to be the faster of the two.

Take a look:

Haven't had much time to work on the site lately, and the comment spam has become a bit of a nuisance, even with the captcha module enabled. The problem? Someone has written a bot that uses "people" as a comment subject, innocuous sounding enough, and http://www.google.com as a homepage.

Now it would be easy enough to simply blacklist the offending IP, but I don't want to first get spam and then have to delete it. No, I'd much rather check that both those conditions (name and url) are inappropriate and then redirect the bot. I could also change the code to check the username, but that is much more variable across the spams I've seen, which is too bad since it it a mandatory field for posting a comment.

So I've tweaked comment.module a little and added the following to take advantage of the neat 403.php script over at the most excellent The Net is Dead tech/design blog:

Been quiet for a while, what with the work thing and all. I'm going to be working on a new theme for the site since it has been a while since I did one from scratch. I like this theme though, so I'll leave things as they are and change my theme as a user when logged in. It is easy to select a theme as a user, so if the new one is better than this, it is a single checkbox.

Spring cleaning or fever of some such thing has hit, time for a little shakeup.