Well, I finally got a revision 1.0 out the door for one of my Drupal modules.  A fact I thought I'd celebrate with a blog.

The module with this honour is the most recent one I started, userpoints_evaporate, just over a week ago.

I guess it's a nice example of why open source is cool. Someone on the #drupal-support channel on Freenode asked if anyone knew whether an existing module could do what he wanted, which was essentially use the UserPoints module (which works kind of like karma on Launchpad) to automatically expire a set number of points for all users every hour or day (again, kind of like karma on Launchpad).

Simplenews is a quick and easy way to set up and manage newsletters on Drupal, but if you add it to a site which already has users, you might want a way to quickly subscribe all your users to your newsletter.

Rather than click through all users and manually subscribe them - which can be a little bit boring if you have thousands of users - you can run a few SQL queries to mass-subscribe everyone in one go.

Since I started doing the occasional consulting job for Open Query, I've seen a lot of MySQL servers that have been installed once and then forgotten about. This gave me the idea to do a short presentation about some basic MySQL server configuration. The first go was at DrupalCampMelbourne and I recently tried (and failed) to cram it into a three minute lightning talk slot at the LUV September meeting.

The title of the talk is (now) MySQL > YourSQL. I chose this not because I think that MySQL is better than the $other_database you use or because I may or may not run a newer version of MySQL on better hardware, but because I use InnoDB and not MyISAM as the default table format. More importantly, I do not run the server with the shipped default configuration.

These configuration tips are also included in the MySQL section of Pro Linux System Administration.

Most distributions ship MySQL with a configuration file that sees you running a server optimised for a system with 32MB of RAM. That was great in 1996, but these days your Nike+ shoes have more capacity than that, so it makes sense to optimise the configuration - or at least to make it not suck quite as badly.

I chose InnoDB as the default storage engine not because it gives me a magic increase in performance or transaction support, but due to the  improved reliability that comes from its ability to automatically recover from crashes better than MyISAM does.

All the following settings go in the [mysqld] section of your my.cnf file.

A while ago I posted that the combination of nginx and php5 in fastcgi mode was actually working better for me than apache with mod-php5.

In order to help me easily deploy new web hosts that use this setup, I created a tiny package that contains an init script and a configuration file.

Virtually all of my Drupals are hosted on a single server, running Apache with mod_php5. Apache is by no means light-weight, so the server is starting to creak a bit under the combined load of all these sites.

I've been meaning to have a go at configuring nginx with php5 in fastcgi mode, to check the difference this would make on system load.