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Dedicated to helping other bloggers learn how to blog and how to promote a blog. These articles are all about the skills of blogging.
Steve FranciaJan 19,2010

Benchmarking Cloudfront (and S3)

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Amazon has done it again bringing another computing service to the masses. This time it’s the Content Delivery Network or CDN. Cloudfront is a direct competitor to other popular CDNs such as Akamai. While Akamai requires a fairly substantial amount of traffic to become a customer, Cloudfront doesn’t. It follows all of Amazons, pay for what you use mentality. This means that everyone can benefit from incorporating Cloudfront into their blog, site, store, etc..

For purposes of experimentation, I decided to track how much of a difference Amazons Cloudfront made over simple s3 public hosting vs hosting locally on my webhost. I decided to use stevefrancia.com for this experiment since it is a very small and simple site with a single html file a couple css and js files and a handful of images. No server side processing or other significant variables, perfect for benchmarking.

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Steve FranciaDec 14,2009

Getting Started with Drupal

Página home de una instalación drupal con un a...

Image via Wikipedia

Drupal is a very powerful content management solution. It powers this website as well as zoopframework.com. Drupal is a relatively easy to use system, but there are a few key concepts that you really need to understand in getting started. I often find that webcasts are fantastic resources for instruction. I recently helped a non-techie friend setup a drupal site and was suprised at how many (really bad) drupal videos existed online. I have compiled some of the better ones here as a resource and guide to getting started with Drupal.

I focused on getting started with Drupal, assuming you have already installed Drupal. I’ll create a separate post on installing Drupal or use Justin Hileman’s excellent guide.

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Steve FranciaOct 24,2009

Best Drupal Themes

Drupal

Image via Wikipedia

In my opinion Drupal is the best CMS available. It is full featured, scalable, and easy to use. Due to how powerful it is and how large the community is, Drupal can be a bit overwhelming to start. I’ve compiled a list of the best themes available. I’ve only listed themes available for Drupal 6 (though some also work with 5.x and 4.x). Thumbnails are provided by the theme designers.

Colourise

Drupal Theme: Colourise

Acquia Marina

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Steve FranciaOct 23,2009

Conclusion of the Blog-a-thon

Today marks the last post of my blog-a-thon. It has been a learning and growing experience. I have blogged more time in the past 4 weeks as I did the prior 52. It was challenging and rewarding.

I feel I have developed as a blogger and having 3 posts a week has brought the blog to the front of my mind. Not only did I write many articles, but I’ve started a bunch more and have ideas for even more than that. Needless to say increasing the frequency of posts actually increased my depth of topics and ideas.

Towards the end (this week) I started to run a bit out of steam. It was a combination of a bunch of external forces that really squashed the time I would have rather been blogging. Sometimes life is like that though. Besides, this isn’t my day job. It wasn’t mission critical, it was intended as a challenge and for fun. All in all it was a good experience. I think I’d do it again, but probably not for a while.

I do think I will continue to blog more regularly, but probably more on a one or two a week schedule as with my current work and family responsibilities that seems a bit more practical.

Steve FranciaOct 12,2009

Migrating to FeedBurner

I’ve made the decision to take control of my feeds. I want to know how many users are reading my blog via sydication so I’ve decided to move to feedburner. The migration will be seemless for all readers. Additionally I’ll be able to provide syndication via email as well.

How to Migrate from Drupal to FeedBurner

These directions are written with Drupal in mind, though the approach used would work for pretty much any system. All we need to do is 3 simple steps. 

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Steve FranciaOct 07,2009

How I Blog

Not surprisingly, given my semi random content, I arrive at my posts a few different ways.

1. I better write this down or I’ll never remember it

These posts are the result of a rather frustrating night of problem solving. After reading tons of documentation and googling around, reading forums and discussing on IRC I finally got it working. Now I better write it down so I know how to do it next time.

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