I (like a lot of other people) recently started to work at home a lot more, and with a permanent desk setup at home I wanted a decent keyboard to work with. My work machine is a MacBook Pro 2018 and I dislike the keyboard quite a lot. It feels 'poppy', has some interesting key placements (the up and down arrows in particular), has no escape key or function keys at all.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Dropsolid.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Based in Gent, Belgium, Dropsolid is a Drupal development agency who have built a Drupal hosting platform. The Dropsolid Experience Cloud is a platform built from years of experience in hosting and maintaining Drupal.

I met a few of the team at DrupalCamp London 2020 and they were kind enough to supply me with a key to evaluate the platform.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Platform.sh.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Platform.sh is a PaaS site created by Commerce Guys, who are the main driving force being the Drupal Commerce suite of modules. They split off in 2016 and have grown to become a very respectable company in the PaaS space. They have also expanded their service to support a lot more than Drupal so you can easily deploy your Drupal and WordPress sites side by side.

Continuing my review of some Drupal PaaS hosting platforms I am taking a look at Pantheon.

What I'm not doing is a massive deep dive on all platforms. Ultimately, your milage will vary and what you get out of these platforms will be different for most people. You will know the requirements of your project and what you need to accomplish.

Also, if you want to know more about a platform, then please contact them directly. I'm sure they will be happy to hear from you.

Pantheon provides a PaaS solution started in 2010 in the USA. They now have a worldwide support staff and have data centres in a variety of different locations throughout the world. They started out as a specialist Drupal host, but now have support for WordPress hosting solutions.

I've been looking at Drupal hosting solutions recently, and after trying a few I thought I would write a quick review of each. I was specifically looking for hosting providers that provide dedicated Drupal hosting support and an administration dashboard of some kind. It turns out that a handful of such suppliers exist. Whilst it is perfectly possible to setup a server on AWS or DigitalOcean and then install Drupal there, this isn't what I am looking at. The good thing about Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions is that you get hosting, backup, recovery, logging, tools, and analysis all built in. Some platforms even have extra tools like build pipelines, marketing systems or analytics.

Grep is a really powerful tool for finding things in files. I often use it to scan for plugins in the Drupal codebase or to scan through a CSV or log file for data.

For example, to scan for user centric ViewsFilter plugins in the Drupal core directory use this command (assuming you are relative to the core directory).

grep "@ViewsFilter(\"user" -r core

The -r flag here recursively scans the 'core' directory. This command returns the following output.

After looking at Conway's game of life I have been looking at other forms of cellular automata. This lead me to discover Langton's ant, which is a different kind of cellular automata where an agent (namely an ant) is used to turn the squares on or off as it travels around a grid.

The rules of Langton's ant are quite simple. The ant simply follows two rules as it moves around the grid.

Something I've been writing long hand for a number of years is wrap around increments. This is essentially adding to a value that has an upper limit, and wrapping back to 0 when that max value is reached. This can be done with an if statement.

The other day I was tasked with creating the weekly quiz for my family. I decided it would be good to do a section that would consist of 10 words that were spelled using symbols of the chemical elements. The questions would be presented as a list of element names, like this.

Barium Carbon Potassium Tungsten Argon Darmstadtium

This breaks down to the element symbols in the following way.

Barium = Ba
Carbon = C
Potassium = K
Tungsten = W
Argon = Ar
Darmstadtium = Ds

Putting that all together we spell out a word.

BaCKWArDs

Backwards!

After a bit of thinking about what words I could use I decided to write a program that would help me. The questions in the quiz did not go down very well, but I thought I would put the code that I used here.

The first thing I did was to set up an array of elements that I could use to compare parts of words with.

Drupal 9 will be released on June 3rd, 2020 so with this just around the corner I thought I'd put together a post about how to check if your site is ready. The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was more of an upheaval than an upgrade. Updating a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 requires a lot of effort involving code changes and migration steps. Drupal 7 modules are not compatible with Drupal 8 and so any custom code written needs to be adapted to the new structure of Drupal. The difficulty of this change made the Drupal community take notice and think about how future versions of Drupal are introduced.