PcHousekeeping

I read a motivational article entitled 5 Ways To Improve Drupal 7 Performance. I think it taught me something and resulted in some experimentation here at PcHousekeeping.

I have installed Boost and Memcached which are two of the tools mentioned in the article. A side effect of testing is the CDN module which came to my attention and is really nice. Read more about Speed Up Drupal 7 Performance

Boost is recommended to help with caching in Drupal 7 for "anonymous" traffic. That's users that aren't logged in. I installed it here at PcHousekeeping a few days ago and it really seems to have picked up the speed. Read more about Boost Module for Drupal Caching

The super support folks at KnownHost installed Memcached for me today on my VPS. I also asked for the PECL Memcache libraries and they got the latest stable version which is 2.2.6 at this time. Did I need it? No not for this little site with light traffic, but I had to see how it all worked so that when the time comes I will know. Read more about Memcache Installed on VPS

One of the first things I have seen when looking at YSlow and Pingdom reports is the need to serve files that change little from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). Using the CDN module for Drupal 7 worked on one site, but here at PcHousekeeping it just wouldn't play right. I found a good tutorial by Wim Leers the developer of the CDN module and it encouraged me to use commercial CDN service. Read more about Deployed CDN Here

Thanks to some helpful web searches PcHousekeeping is using Apache Solr with the Drupal Apache Solr Search Integration module. The Facet API module is also installed to give all the nice search filters. This site really doesn't need the extra power of Solr, but since so many people need help with it I needed to be able to do it. Read more about Apache Solr and Drupal 7

The new Flex Slider module for Drupal 7 offers a real easy slideshow. I'm testing it here with just the minimum options. The Views and Views Slideshow options are not enabled. My test is with some images sized to 300px wide and Flex Slider knows to resize itself to fit the available space. It even looks real good on my iPhone. Read more about Finally an Easy Slideshow

Since Google rules the web I've decided to fall in line and add the Google +1 Plus One  and Badge module here. It looks to be well done and supported and gives the option of having a button beside each item of content or put the +1 badge in a block. I'll be playing with both here just to see how it goes.

As Plus One grows in it's attempt to compete with Facebook this should be very interesting. Read more about Google +1 Module Added

Some people like the rounded corners that CSS3 can give to things like blocks and menu tabs. The problem has been that Internet Explorer doesn't support that while Firefox, and Google Chrome do. Read more about CSS3pie Module Works Fine

The last couple of days I have been converting my oldest site, whitelakeworld.com, to Drupal 7.12. I came across the problem of not being able to access a password protected directory in the web root outside of my Drupal install. I had the same problem when I converted this site to Drupal a while back and let it stump me.

On both sites I have a script that runs from cron to update a section of the site devoted to affiliate products. It simply takes a datafeed file and uses it to update the database. Read more about Directories Outside Drupal

The AvantLinker module for Drupal 7 has been listed today at AvantLink as a Certified 3rd Party Affiliate Tool. This duplicates the functionality found in the plugin that they developed for WordPress. It automates a lot of your affiliate link building activities. Read more about Drupal AvantLinker Module Listed