Blog

Over the last couple of weekends I converted my blog from Octopress to straight Jekyll (still hosting on S3). There wasn’t any particular reason behind the move, but I was curious to know more about the differences between the two platforms, wanted to try out a new theme, and just generally enjoy these types of migrations. Overall, there aren’t many differences between the two platforms. As many have stated before, the major difference is that Octopress comes with more functionality out of the box, but at the cost of increased complexity....

I recently pieced together a bash wrapper script to create, add, and delete an ssh key for temporary use in performing remote tasks over ssh. The processes outlined here assume cURL is available, and that the remote service you wish to connect to has API methods for ssh key handling. Automating the process of generating and deleting a local ssh key is the easy part. Here’s one way to create a key:...

After building a bash script to automate Drupal module deployments, I figured it might be worthwhile to convert the script over to Ruby. I decided to spin up the new version as a Ruby gem leveraging the Thor CLI Framework. Having already worked out many of the mechanics of deploying Drupal contrib modules in the previous bash script, I was able to dive right into coding. I started by fleshing out the command options and then moved into scripting the functionality....

Part of the process of migrating new customers to Acquia Hosting involves adding (or verifying the presence of) three Drupal modules: Acquia Network Connector: get status and recommendations from Acquia Insight Fast 404: reduce the cost of 404s Memcache API and Integration: improve performance by moving cache data into memory Manual?! Awe shucks… Verifying, adding, and committing these modules manually generally takes about five to ten minutes and can be error-prone....

I put together a GitHub Gist with a generated GeoJSON document, along with the bash command that was used to create the data. GitHub automatically generates maps for GeoJSON files in Gists and repositories. This is well documented at the following article: https://help.github.com/articles/mapping-geojson-files-on-github The script pulls data from eBird API, transforms the data structure into GeoJSON format using jq, and then POSTs the result to a GitHub Gist where it is displayed as an interactive map....