Alan's Blog

Well, that's the question of the day. If you're part of an organization that does advocacy work, rather than waiting to see what happens first, might as well get yourself ready, even if the details are sketchy still. Here's one opportunity that's ready for you now, message courtesy of Steve Anderson of OpenMedia. OpenMedia, David Suzuki Foundation, SumOfUs and a range of other organizations are

I've had a varnish installation protecting http://www.fairvote.ca -- a wordpress site hosted at webhosting canada (whc.ca) -- for about a year. Last Friday in the evening, it started spitting out 503 errors, for no obvious reason. I spent a few hours yesterday in vain trying to get the hosts to tell me what, if anything might have changed at their end. What I eventually figured out is that they

Four and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about Varnish, a 'front-end proxy' for webservers. My best description of it then was as a protective bubble, analogous to how it's namesake is used to protect furniture. I've been using it happily ever since. But last week, I got to really put Varnish through a test when the picture here, posted by Fair Vote Canada (one of my clients), went viral

Do one thing each day that scares you? How about, watch your toddler ...

My cousin Vikki has been helping us for the past month and is leaving to head back home in a couple of days. We had her over for dinner last night and she brought Lily a new hat!

My normal configuration of a public site on my servers involves using varnish for the page cache and setting expire page to 1 day. This mostly works quite well (the varnish module in Drupal takes care of clearing the varnish cache when you're creating/editing content). We recently launched a new Drupal version of the Calgary French & International School (okay, I was just along for the

Lily is my daughter, born a couple of days after my previous post, now almost 5 months old.

The 4.3 version of CiviCRM that first came out in April 2013 addresses a key problem with CiviCRM for large organizations: namely, accounting integration. So what exactly does that mean, and how does it work? Since I'm working on a big migration to CiviCRM, and the client has "accounting integration" needs, I've been diving in and trying to understand the nitty gritty. Since I started, 4.4 is