If you have a typographical correction for the Sri Chinmoy Library, you can create an issue report here.
Welcome to Vasudeva Server!
Here is our latest news and tips we can share from working on our sites...
Sri Chinmoy Library Editing
July 27th, 2010 by tejvan · Category: srichinmoylibrary.com
→ No CommentsTags:
New Drupal modules by Vasudeva Server
June 2nd, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Vasudeva Server
We are pleased to announce some new Drupal modules we have developed
- Rearrange Child Pages – allows you to change the order and titles of the child pages of the node you are currently on. This is very useful if you are using Drupal’s book funtionality on a very large site and the books contain very many nodes. View project page…
- Domain Migrate – Allows users to migrate content on existing Drupal sites to their own domains. View project page…
In addition, we have merged our Domain Administration Helper module into the Domain Admin module, and are now co-maintainers of that module
→ No CommentsTags:
Domain Administration Helper module released on drupal.org
March 12th, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Uncategorized
Vasudeva Server are pleased to announce the first of what we hope to be many contributions to the Drupal community – the Domain Administration Helper module. You can visit its page on drupal.org here…
Basically, the module allows administrators of subdomains to do admin tasks without requiring sitewide permissions. We developed it for our websites srichinmoyraces.org and srichinmoycentre.org. These sites have subdomains for each country (50 for Sri Chinmoy Centre, 40 for Sri Chinmoy Races) and we wanted to give the website editors in each country as much flexibility over their own sites as possible, whilst still keeping each site as a harmonious whole.
→ No CommentsTags:
Three minutes every hour
March 8th, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Uncategorized
Sri Chinmoy, the inspiration behind Vasudeva Server, suggested once that having a small meditation every hour on the hour for three minutes could help you stay in an inspired frame of mind throughout the day. It is something I actually did many years ago when I was researching my PhD, when nobody really cared too much what you did with your time, but as the years progressed I somehow lost the habit. However working with computers means that sometimes you definitely need all the tools at your disposal in order to stay in an inspiring frame of mind 
I thought about it again recently, and started searching around for some application for my Mac that would toll the hour, so I could break of from what I was doing and meditate. It didn’t take me long to find Cuckoo – it basically installs itself in your System Preference pane. For an extra $6 you can get all kinds of extra bells and whistles, but the free version has what I need, a ding dong sound to mark the hour. (Note: the ‘Campanile’ tone seems custom-made for hourly meditation. Maybe in some future version they’ll even put in some Tibetan bells or an Aum chant to further make my day. )
→ No CommentsTags:
Don’t Make Me Think
February 21st, 2010 by tejvan · Category: Useful stuff
"Don’t Make Me Think" is a book about designing websites by Steve Krug.
I only read it very briefly but liked the essence of his book.
Inspired by this book and other sources here are a few ideas for designing sites.
1. First Impressions Count:
People’s attention span is very short, especially on the internet.
If something is too complicated or not interesting, they can easily click and leave.
2. Make it Obvious
People don’t surf the net to work things out and calculate, people generally take the path of least resistance.
You may spend hours designing and working on a site, but 80% of your visitors will spend less than 30 seconds.
3. Simplicity
Don’t overcomplicate pages. But, make it very clear what it is about.
4. Send Visitors Where You Want Them To Go
Web visitors do not spend time trying to think where they want to go. They will click on the most obvious links. Therefore, make sure, you point visitors exactly where you want them to go.
→ No CommentsTags:
New GitHub repository
February 11th, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Uncategorized
We now have a GitHub repository for releasing Drupal modules (and other code, if needs be) to the general public. We have placed a couple of our smaller modules there for now, with more to follow. See our new repo here…
Eventually, many of these modules will find their way onto drupal.org, but here’s a good place to put them until that happens
→ No CommentsTags:
Dterm – a very handy command-line utility…
February 1st, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Useful stuff
I was rebuilding my development setup following my recent hard drive crash when i came across this very useful Mac utility: Dterm.
Put simply, it allows you to go to a folder using finder, press a hotkey (apple + shift + return, but that can be configured) and then a window comes up where you can enter a command line:
Perfect if you just want to enter one command, you can also select files and use them as argumants. And if you need to do more than just one line, press shift + return and a Terminal window will open up already arrived at that folder.
( p.s notice the amount of space i have in my new hard drive – every cloud has a silver lining )
→ No CommentsTags:
Configuring private keys for ssh access
January 22nd, 2010 by nirbhasa · Category: Servers
(On Mac OS X) – This assumes you have already downloaded your priviate keys to your desktop
There are 2 keys, one private and one public (this one has a .pub extension). Using Terminal, move your downloaded keys to your .ssh folder: for each file, type
mv Desktop/{name of key file} ~/.ssh/
Give your keys the proper names:
cd ~/.ssh/
mv {name of private key} id_rsa
mv {name of public key} id_rsa.pub
The private key should have readonly permissions:
chmod 400 ~/.ssh/id_rsa
So now you can login to the server. To simplify the process, you also create a text file ~/.ssh/config , where you can set three lines for ssh login info for your simple ssh use. To create the file, type:
vim ~/.ssh/config
Press ‘I’ (capital i) to go into ‘edit mode’, and then the following 3 lines (using the example of our Vasudeva Server servers:)
Host {server-name}.vasudevaserver.net
Port {port-number}
User {user-name}
Where {server-name} is the name of our server in lower case, {port-number} is the port we use to connect (for security reasons this is very often changed from the default port 22) and {user-name} is your user name to access the server. When you are finished, press escape (to exit edit mode) and then ‘ZZ’ (to exit and save changes)
After you have done that, you can try to log in using the command
ssh {server-name}.vasudevaserver.net
Another tip…
You can also create a simple alias for the server name by adding a line to your /etc/hosts file
{server-ip} {server-name} {server-name}.vasudevaserver.net
So a example for a hypothetical server antara.vasudevaserver.net located at ip address 127.0.0.1 would be
127.0.0.1 antara antara.vasudevaserver.net
This means that when accessing our servers, you can simply type
ssh {server-name}
without the vasudevaserver.net at the end.
→ No CommentsTags:
Using git to develop sites (developers only)
January 14th, 2010 by tejvan · Category: Repository
We have recently moved our Drupal and WordPress repositories to git. We will also be putting our databases and static site filesystems there too, so we can generate test sites locally with a simple script. Here’s how to get started with developing sites:
Installing and configuring Git
- Mac OS X: Go to download page and download the latest version.
- On Windows: Go to download page and download Git-{version}-preview{release date}.exe
To configure git, there are some nice instructions here…
(VS Users: Aparajita has supplied in ticket SYSADM-610 to configure your git install: just download it, use Terminal to go to the directory where the script is, and type sh git_setup.sh. You will be asked for full name and email address.)
Using git
To create a version of the Drupal or wordpress repository on your local site, create a directory. Open Terminal, go to that directory and use:
git clone git@{servername}.vasudevaserver.net:drupal.git
or
git clone git@{servername}.vasudevaserver.net:wordpress.git
This will put the contents of the repository in that folder. Note: If the repository uses gitolite to control access via ssh, you must have the appropriate ssh keys on your machine to do this. In addition, you need to have these lines in your .ssh/config file
host gitolite
user git
hostname {server}.vasudevaserver.net
port {port_name}
To make changes to the repository, you have a few options:
- Use the command line
- There is a git client called SmartGit which is free for non-commercial purposes. We are still in the initial stages of testing it, but right now it seems to have everything we need
- There is a application called GitX which has a very nice interface that shows all commits and lets you commit to your local version of the repository. However (at the moment) you still need to use the command line to update your local filesystem from the server repository (using Terminal, go to the directory and type
git pull) and then push your changes back to the server repository (git push)
→ No CommentsTags:
Getting Rid of Ads
July 4th, 2009 by · Category: blogging
To view sites without ads
- Use Firefox web brower
- Download Ad Block Plus
- Use one of the recommended lists of ad providers
→ No CommentsTags: