If you know me, you know that I work on a lot of Drupal sites. You might also know that SliceHost (now a part of RackSpace) is one of the most affordable and simple VPS hosting solutions out there. That said, you might not know that I run several of my own Drupal sites on a single SliceHost 256 slice (256mb ram, that is).

Since I put up my personal blog site using Drupal on a slice, I've noticed that the site, despite being very straightforward as far as Drupal sites go, was not performing very well (3-5 second page loads were common, 400-500ms before initial HTTP response codes). So, I decided to take a closer look to determine what was going on and try to resolve the performance issue.

Last month Chapter Three announced they were working on a Firefox plugin and Drupal module that would allow Firebug to talk with Drupal. As a Web Developer who uses Firebug heavily every day and who specializes in Drupal, this announcement from Chapter Three got me a little excited -- so I installed the plugin, enabled the module, and gave it a shot.

Any Drupal developer worth his salt at least knows of the Views module. The shear usefulness and time-saving nature of views has earned the module a place in every Drupal site I've developed. However, because views are stored in the database and their presentation is controlled by the views module itself, managing views between staging/live sites, handling updates, and tracking revisions become difficult issues when dealing with Views.

A few weeks ago I read a brief but interesting article by Jeff Whatcott on Getting Ecto Set Up with Drupal. I had heard of Ecto in passing but had never really looked into using it. With all the hubbub around WYSIWYG tools for Drupal and the like recently, I wondered if a good desktop application would be a viable solution, so I figured I'd give Ecto a try for myself.

A friend of mine has been using CakePHP to solve some problems where he works lately, and has been asking me for some help here and there. I always love to help as much as I can, but lately I've found my advice when it comes to CakePHP to be less helpful than it was in the past.

I recently presented at an event where several web application frameworks were discussed, including Drupal. Around that time I was also working on several projects written as Drupal modules at a level that I had not done before. These series of events caused me to take a step back and consider Drupal's merit as a web application framework.

This post is in reply to a comment on a previous article that I thought contained some good questions:

At work a few months ago, I was directed to started looking into some options for developing small database applications. So, I set out on my quest to find the best solution out there. Several weeks, and at least as many frameworks later, I finally found a solution that seems to work.