Today I had Javascript loaded, mobile-only ads that needed to be implemented on a responsive site.  Uh oh.

Easy solution?  Hide the div when it isn't mobile.  Unfortunately, that means the ad still gets loaded.  When it's loaded, but not displayed either an advertiser gets falsely charged or your click-rate is negatively skewed.  Big no-no's for a high ad revenue site.

APC stands for Alternative PHP Cache.  APC can provide some great performance benefits for Drupal sites by optimizing how your server processes the PHP code that makes your website work.  Essentially, there are 3 steps that your server does every time a page is requested:

1. Parse the PHP code
2. Compile the PHP code
3. Run the PHP code

Probably everyone who has worked with Drupal to any extent already knows about the benefits of turning on Drupal's built in Page cache.  That said, most people have probably never really thought twice about the negative impact of not doing so on the performance of your website.  While doing some performance benchmarking before overhauling our servers, I decided to take a couple minutes just to test the performance impact of not enabling Drupal's Page cache.

There are numerous different ways to benchmark page request times for your website, but the simplest tool comes with Apache out of the box.  It is called Apache Benchmarx Tool, and it is extremely easy to use.  You just run the command ab on the command line, and it will give you all of the information you need about how to use it.  Just to give you a quick overview of how it works, there are basically 3 flags that you will use quite often when doing benchmarking:

For this project we wanted to use a template to save on design costs, but Children’s Outreach Solutions had their own branding and color scheme that their website needed to match. So we took a best of both worlds approach when it came to the design concept for this Drupal website.

Step-by-Step Guide

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create and retrieve nodes, upload files and access Views with Drupal Services module, REST server and 3-legged OAuth authentication.

1. To begin, you will need to download the following modules: 

When we began working with House of Faith, I soon found out they were located in Texas. I had heard of their home town San Angelo, but I was not exactly sure where it was. So exercising good old Google Maps, I found that Angelo is about four and a half hours south west of McKinney, Texas, and on about the same latitude as Waco.

There are a lot of different items that have to be maintained whether you own a home or a business. Because entropy likes to increase in our universe, we constantly have to do damage control and repairs on our stuff in general to keep things in working order. But some jobs might be too tricky to tackle alone. Or maybe there isn’t enough time to do those jobs. Or maybe a distress signal to the professionals is just the kind of intervention needed so sanity can be preserved with elegance!

We, at Covenant Design, recently had the privilege to work on a sewing blog for Better Homes and Gardens.  It was a great opportunity to really solidify our process for responsive web design.  Responsive web design is simply the concept that your website should be able to be easily and seemlessly viewed on all of the various devices and browsers available.  For example: in Chrome on my computer the website looks like this:

Yet, on my Iphone 4, it displays as:

Recently one of our clients forwarded me an email similar to the one below and wanted to know what I thought about the search engine optimization (SEO) opportunity that the email talked about. The email was from people who were launching a new social community/forum type website and they wanted to feature our client’s company. Sounds legit right? Well, let’s make a judgment call after reading the paraphrased email and explanation: