i wish i could attend the chennai drupal 2010 meet..

around 1 year back,. i landed in chennai, on my first job, fresh out of college

my first weekend in chennai, dint have many frens that time,. and was browsing the net aimlessly,.

i came across Shyamala's post abt a so called 'drupal meet'

i had used drupal to make a few sites in college, but was fairly surprised that this thing has a 'community' here,.

i calld up shyamala and using reach arcopolis somehow using google maps. i couldnt go out with out maps in chennai those days.

i was expecting a rather lousy person with a power point presentation and a few 'wanna-be web designers' as audience, advertising about his computer training academy in the veil of a drupal meet

but what i saw was totally different. Starting from newbies and mediocres like me to ppl who make food out of drupal development, it was rather a discussion than a presentation and many of them asking for solutions that they have faced recently in handling their drupal sites and a few suggesting solutions to it. Here is the meet in Shyamala's words

later i attended all but 1 of the drupal meets that happened in chennai till date.

today, the new years eve of 2009 is my last day in chennai, since i have been transferred to hyderabad. though i am happy about it in many ways, i would definitely miss many things in chennai, one of which is the drupal community here.

i remember attending 'nov 1 meet', new yr spl @ arcopolis ,the one in iit chennai, , and another one,..

i have made 2 more drupal sites this year. one of which is my ever best with 30000 visits a day. if it was not for the drupal meet last year, i would have let go of the webdesign and drupal things.

Since the next meet is on performance, i would like to share that my experience with it. after the site i mentioned became popular and it reached 10000 visitors a day, it started breaking down due to the heavy number of modules in it inspite of suing the built in cache system. Especially it being on a shared host. the sites uptime went down to as low as 30% with most visitors bouncing back even before the site could load. Then Boost came to my rescue. now my pages load at lightenening speed and since its is a sort of 'news site' and most users dont login, it works perfect for me. And i made a few scripts that are run every 5 minutes. They not only delete the caches of front page cache and a few important pages , but also revisist those pages using CURL so that the deleted cache is immediately refreshed with out having to wait for the visitor to generate the cache as the boost's built in crawling system hardly runs on my shared hosting.

As such, i would be in hyd on the 2nd of jan as i leave chennai today eveving, and would nt be able to attend the 2010 meet. i only wish i could attend the 2010 meet but cant attend..