Oh, hello! If you're reading this, it's the first entry I've posted to my blog since upgrading the site to Drupal 7!

As a blogger, the URL field in the WordPress comments form is a constant pain - either spammers are using it to drop shady links, or readers feel compelled to fill it with garbage just to fill in the field. Either way, it's a nuisance. But how do you get rid of it?

This is a quick tip post to show you how to redirect the www version of a domain to it's non-www equivalent using Niginx.

The reasons for doing this are quite technically dense, so a knowledge of web hosting and SEO might be useful. Basically, having the same site available at both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com means that there are two identical copies of your site on the web.

If you've been following this tutorial series for Nginx on Media Temple's (ve) server, you'll know that we've completed three steps - installing Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM for a fully functioning web server. 

This is the third part in my series of articles looking at building an Nginx server on the Media Temple VE service. We currently have a working Nginx installation and a domain name pointed at the server, and in the last step, we installed MySQL and created a first database to store our CMS data.

I've become obsessed in the last few weeks with improving web performance. The more I've looked into optimization techniques, the more Nginx - pronounced "Engine X" - keeps coming up. It's an open source web server that's steadily gaining a name as a companion technology/replacement for Apache. Nginx can be used in two ways

If you're working on developing websites, it's handy to have a development server to test your designs and code against. If you're running Ubuntu, it's fairly easy to install a LAMP stack - I use mine for running test versions of WordPress and Drupal for themeing, but you can use this setup for all kinds of web development.

In this post, I'm going to show you how to quickly install Apache, MySQL and PHP to give yourself a fully-functioning development server. By the way, I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 to carry out this tutorial.

I've got a couple of Drupal sites I'm planning to tidy up and work on over the coming months. Ideas for these sites are currently in flux, so I'm looking around to see other sites running on Drupal, what their features are and how they've been structured and designed.

If you're a convert to Drupal from a blogging platform like WordPress, you might miss the Previous/Next post links that allow visitors to read through the posts on your site in a chronological manner.

I've been searching for a solution to this for a while, but nothing I've found on Drupal.org has offered an acceptable solution for me. What I'm going to show you here is some code I've put together that retrieves the next and previous posts from the database and displays them for the user. If you are a Drupal guru and have suggestions for how to refine this, please share your knowledge in the comments.

I promised a while back that I would make the theme I use on this site available for free download.

Well, here it is. Called GerryBot, it's  a very minimalist one-column Drupal 6 theme. The original concept behind this theme was to have as little as possible on the page to distract from the content. Some of the features are: