When you're building sites which use many contributed modules (+ views and panels) you can end up with a ton of CSS files being called at the same time.  Generally the main down-side to this is load-time, so most Drupal site developers choose to use the css-aggregation function (found under Site Config > Performance) that comes stock with Drupal.

The problem with using Drupal's aggregated CSS is that you end up with a crazy mashed-up chunk of CSS which can be a pain when you're still editing it live on a site in development (for example, using firefox's web development toolbar or firebug).

Asides from the load-time issue, I noticed something else whilst doing x-browser testing on a new site we're developing @ design guru; Internet Explorer 7 won't load more than 30 (or 31?) CSS files at once!  Supposedly a security feature, this annoying phenomenon makes CSS/styling dev work a pain in ie7 but fear not, there's a work-around and its as easy as installing a module!

The 'IE Unlimited CSS Loader' module will save much head-scratching - it fixes the ie7 problem and lets you still work on your site's css without using the Drupal aggregator. Nice. :)

I've spent a little time this week hunting down a well priced Drupal-friendly hosting environment for a client of mine.  Actually, for years I've been extolling the virtues of shared/virtual hosts like Dreamhost who have been bumping up disk space and bandwidth allowances before gmail wet its bed for the first time - but then I signed up @ Rackspace and have fallen in love with how muc quicker Drupal runs when its file structure is on the same machine as its database - especially when that machine solely exists to power your own sites.  read more »

After an upgrade from drupal 5 to 5.3 this weekend I ran into an error on a client's site - which wasn't hosted on one of our servers, so I couldn't look into their server error logs as I didn't have permission!

It was a pretty frustrating place to be as I couldn't tell why I was getting a blank white screen when I tried to access only certain node/add or node/edit pages - at the time I didn't realise that those particular node types used a certain taxonomy that was working with the form tweaker module to make term selections checkboxes instead of lists!!

Anyway, I found a tip that helped me out; add the following line to your settings.php file (in sites/default via ftp) et voila - server error messages will be printed on the not-so-blank white screen, which you can then use to trace the error - which for me was something funky with the form tweaker mod.  read more »

A couple of days back I had a terrible fright when the Drupal Developers Network went down! (Its a new site I just launched  to help Drupal professionals with gig and job listings).

It looked like the site started spitting a 500 Internal Server Error as soon as I had enabled the devel module; which I love for its crafty menu links like 'clear cache.'  After a couple of days of pondering why devel would muck up I came across a post on realjenius.com that details why the module won't work on Dream Host!

Well, the site's back up and running thanks to the helpful fellows at Dream Host and fact that they include automatic backups of both files and databases with their virtual hosting packages! Phew.  read more »