Recent Blog Posts

Earlier this year we supported the IxDA in launching a new version of their IxDA.org site. One of the many interesting new features of this site is the ability to sort content by "hotness". The goal of this tool is to create a list of interesting content on the site. Their analytics show them that most people who are involved in the site visit it at least twice a month. So, they wanted a system to highlight content over the last two to three weeks. Enter the radioactivity module.

Radioactivity Module for Drupal

The Radioactivity module works on the concept of adding energy to a piece of content which then "decays" (or diminishes) with a particular half-life. The exact behavior is up to the site administrator, but on IxDA.org we originally set it up with values roughly similar to:

• Posting content adds a lot of energy so that the hotness favors recent items.
• Commenting on a post adds some energy
• Voting up adds a bit of energy, voting down subtracts some energy
• Favoriting a post adds some energy as well

We've got a few other elements that affect energy to help offset any potential gaming.

We set the half-life for decay to 15 days. So, if a piece of content gets posted and 3 comments and 2 vote ups and 1 favorite with 100 views on the first day it will have about 500 units of energy. If it gets no new energy, it would decay down to 250 units of energy after 15 days, and then down to 125 after 30 days and so on. Eventually the energy and decay are really small and for efficiency the module simply deletes all records with less than 2 units of energy.

I had some issues where cron wasn't running the scripts that I had placed into /etc/cron.hourly nor /etc/cron.daily and I spent a bit of time trying out different things to figure out how to fix it. Here are some of the things I fixed. I think the problems were, in fact, not all present but several were which meant every time I thought I had it fixed I would come back later and see it was still wasn't running.

An Extension on Your Program Name in /etc/cron.*/

Cron has very specific rules about file names. In fact, those rules are:

same naming convention as used by run-parts(8): they must consist solely of upper- and lower-case letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens.

So, don't put a period nor file "extension" on those files.

Cron Scripts Inherit A Limited Environment

Unless you've added information to the top of your /etc/crontab, the environment for the user that runs cron jobs will be very limited. All commands and shell scripts should be prefixed with the path (i.e. "/usr/bin/mysqldump" instead of "mysqldump"). Specifically state the shell at the top of the file.

Make Sure The Jobs are in /etc/crontab and Cron/Anacron are installed

Just because you're using "Ubuntu" doesn't mean it's the same Ubuntu that you're used to. Make sure that appropriate jobs have been added to the /etc/crontab file. It's possible that cron/anacron won't be installed on the system. If not, try:

sudo apt-get install cron anacron

Make a Basic Script and Check the Cron Log

Depending on your system this may be in different places, but for me it was in /var/log/syslog. If that isn't helpful, try adding debugging statements to different scripts to make sure they are running and test different assumptions along the way. You can also try creating a script that will get executed first ("aaa_test_script" is my favorite) and make it do something really trivial like

echo $PATH > /tmp/cron_path.txt

We've got a few exciting announcements here at Drupalcon. Two of those are related to a new site we launched yesterday, CertifiedToRock.com.

Woven Druplicon Hats

We got some beautiful hand-made, wool Druplicon hats from Peru with the help of my good friend Fernando Garcia (develcuy) and the artisans that his lovely wife Nancy works with. Now we're ready to give these hats away - for free - but of course there's a catch ;)

Certification for Drupal with CertifiedToRock.com

We've built a super simple (and yet, we think, still valid) certification for Drupal users based on their involvement with the Drupal project. It's located at CertifiedtoRock.com where you can enter a drupal.org username and see the corresponding certification level of that individual. Learn more about CertifiedToRock.

If you want a hat, tweet a link to your score with @certifiedtorock and we'll hook you up if your score is 6 or higher. After noon on Wednesday we'll be giving out hats to anyone with a score of 5 or higher.

I've written about the Burn Down Art site before. One unexpected result of the site is that people are visiting it based on a variety of different search terms and a few aren't getting the data they really need.

Template Burn Down Chart - Excel, Google Spreadsheet, OpenOffice.org

One thing that a lot of people have been looking for is an example or template version of a burn down chart that they can use for themselves. I won't claim that this is the best chart, but it's simple and it works pretty well.

A couple of suggestions:

• It counts your stories and sets them for number of stories to burn down
• It will count the days in your sprint and decrement the expected stories remaining row by that amount
• There is a row to show how to add a story mid-way through the sprint
• Some people like to add more columns to the raw data showing the priority and the status
• Some people like to add formatting to the 0/1 cells to show when it became a 0 as a more visual indicator on the data sheet.

Regarding the Google Spreadsheet - I created both of these documents using Google Spreadsheets and then exported them. But there's no way for me to share the current burn down spreadsheet from Google Docs to the rest of the world to use as a template. Bummer! However, you can import either of the attached documents and it will work just fine. Enjoy!