Introducing Survey Builder - Presentation
Posted 12 Dec 2011 (1 minute read)
Survey Builder is a Drupal 7 module that allows you to create surveys, questionnaires, or plain old forms using a drag and drop interface. It makes use of the fantastic form_builder module, with views and features integration, and rules integration planned. Atchai has built this module and contributed it as open-source to the Drupal Community, first presented at the London Drupal Dropin event, held at Capgemini in December 2011. Built specifically for Drupal 7, making use of entities and form_builder module, with views integration allowing you to easily create your own interfaces and analytics.
Read moreLinked Data Platform Architecture mk. II
Posted 19 Sep 2011 (5 minute read)
Since it’s inception as a re-usable toolkit fed from the work we have been doing with the NHS National Innovation Centre, the Linked Data Platform has evolved. The core functionality is still focussed on taking data from spreadsheets and other structured sources (including SPARQL endpoints) and then visualising this data within a Drupal-based UI. However, we’ve learnt a lot along the way and are currently planning and implementing changes in the technology and architecture we use to pursue this goal.
Read moreGoogle Refine vs XLWrap
Posted 5 Sep 2011 (4 minute read)
We’ve been using XLWrap as a tool to take data from spreadsheets and turn it into RDF triples. At the time we started using XLWrap, there was no alternative that would enable us to generate multiple triples from one cell in a spreadsheet (we’ll explain why this is important later), and there was also no Google Refine. The product that would later become Google Refine was called Freebase Gridworks, but at the time we were evaluating tools it had no RDF support, so didn’t really qualify.
Read moreSpaces Module as a Drupal Multi-site alternative
Posted 20 Aug 2011 (7 minute read)
If you want to share users, content and configuration between Drupal sites you have several options. The most common approaches are either to use a multi-site architecture, RSS feeds, or domain access module. In this post, I’ll discuss an alternative method using Spaces and PURL modules, a highly flexible architecture that enables you to tailor multiple spaces that can appear to be completely independent sites, but which all run from the same Drupal installation.
Read moreLoad Testing Drupal in the Cloud
Posted 20 Aug 2010 (5 minute read)
In this article we will talk through setting up a simple load testing scenario for Drupal applications using Amazon’s Elastic Cloud computing. Amazon EC2 will enable you to easily set up testing scenarios for a relatively low cost, e.g. you can find out what the effect of adding an additional database server will make without actually buying one! JMeter will allow us to create complex test plans to measure the effect of our optimisations, we’ll set up a remote JMeter load generator on EC2 that we’ll control from our desktop.
Read moreLinux: Finding files created in the last X hours
Posted 19 Aug 2010 (1 minute read)
You cannot use the -ctype or -mtype modifiers if the timeframe you’re interested in is within the last 24hrs. If you want to find all files created in, say, the last two hours; magic up a file with the created time set to two hours ago like this: touch -t YYYYMMDDHHMM t.tmp Then use find’s -newer switch to look for files which are newer: find . -newer t.tmp
Read moreStopping ._ files being created on non-Mac volumes
Posted 19 Aug 2010 (1 minute read)
When editing a file on a non-Mac volume (e.g. when editing files on a samba share) you may notice that an additional file gets created along with the one you’re editing, prefixed with “._”. For example if you create a file called Filename.txt, a file called ._Filename.txt will also be created. You may also see a file called .DS_Store appear. They’re meta files, which are fine on a Mac HFS file system because they’re stored in the resource fork and invisible to the end user.
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