
DevOps

Website Availability - handling an outage
How do you get a website back up, when it goes down?

Deployment and release strategies
When you build a new website, going live is relatively easy. You get ahold of a domain name, point it at a webhost, put the website code there, and you're up and running!
After a site is live, it gets a lot more complicated.

Ask Freelock: "Traditional hosts" vs "cloud providers"
A client asks about yet another hosting option:
The VPS-2000HA-S includes the following resources:
6GB RAM (burstable)
150GB SSD Disk space
5TB Monthly Bandwidth
4 free dedicated IP's

WordPress reaches 5.0!
A major new release for WordPress dropped today -- perhaps the one with the biggest impact in WordPress history!
Should you upgrade?
Probably not just yet. At least not if you have content to publish.

What's up on Nerd Mountain? Go Ahead Make Changes in Prod! We Got Your Back
Have you ever heard the one about the web developer who goes in to make one last change to the site at 4:45PM on a Friday afternoon? It is SUCH an easy fix--he can get it done and go home for the weekend with his head held high. Ah, what a relaxing weekend it will be!
Homepage
Your website should do more

And you're not sure exactly what -- it just could be better.


How do you keep a high bar of quality on dozens of sites every day?
DevOps is the union of development, operations, and quality assurance -- but it's really the other way around.

Drupal vs WordPress: Why there are no objective comparisons
WordPress versus Drupal. Republican versus Democrat. Two debates where the differences seem so broad, people can't even seem to agree upon fundamental facts. Why? Why is it so hard to find an objective, clear comparison of WordPress and Drupal? I've had several people ask this.

Git Branch Strategy meets Continuous Deployment
Our branch strategy based on Git Flow did not survive. It was getting a bit old in the tooth, but the final blow was automation.

A Flash of Insight
Its name is Watney. Watney lives in Matrix. Watney is a bot I created about 6 months ago to start helping us with various tasks we need to do in our business.
Watney patiently waits for requests in a bunch of chat rooms we use for internal communications about each website we manage, each project we work on. Watney does a bunch of helpful things already, even though it is still really basic -- it fetches login links for us, helps us assemble release notes for each release we do to a production site, reminds us when it's time to do a release, and kicks off various automation jobs.