29th Aug
2005

I'm back from sunny Normandy. I had a fantastic two weeks, thanks for asking. Super-slow, hot weather, lots of land to roam around in and our very own donkey and water vole. Pictures as soon as get hold of my brother's digital camera!

A nice surprise when I returned was the news that the lucky folks at drupal.org have got their sites moved over to their new servers. In a recent hiccup with their old host, the Drupal guys realised they were quickly outgrowing their existing setup and something needed to be done, ASAP. The Drupal community consists of users and developers alike, and was getting busier day by day.

Fortunately, the Drupal community is a strong one, and after a donation drive they managed to gather nearly three times the amount they were after for a new server. Coupled with two extremely generous donations from Open Source Labs (free hosting and co-location) and Sun Microsystems (a Sun Fire V20x server), this meant that the project maintainers were able to draw up a plan to set up an infrastructure that should see them well for the foreseeable future.

Why am I telling you this? Well, Drupal is our content management system of choice, and we actively support and contribute to the project. Both drupal.org and the developers site drupaldocs.org are now running like a dream, with extremely fast page-loads: saving us time and frustration whilst we're busy putting together our sites and projects. Its also an encouraging sight to see how members of an open source community can club together and come up with quite a tidy sum of cash!

So, cheers to all who donated and to those who must've worked some crazy overtime to get the new hardware up and the sites switched over. Congrats to all at Drupal, and best of luck for the future.