While looking for an easy-to-use framework/starting theme for my websites I learned that Zen was one of the most popular choices in the Drupal community, but I could not understand how the content and sidebar columns worked with negative right margins. It took me a few minutes to realize that while the width is specified in the CSS, the math between margin-right and margin-left needs to match it in order to have well positioned columns.

This post only applies to designers who wish to understand how Zen works and/or wish to position columns in a different configuration.

In the last months I noticed how the database for my Drupal site was over 100 megabytes, I knew something needed to be done but I did not know what, until now.

While switching from GoDaddy to Dreamhost I learned that Dreamhost sets you up with a unique sub-domain for your database, something like http://db.yourdomain.com that you can access without logging in to your host account and finding your way to phpMyAdmin. This feature made it easy for me to find out which parts (tables) of my database were the ones slowing down my Drupal installation.

There are a ton of sites regarding this issue, I spent lots of hours figuring this one out. Every one of those sites forgot to tell you uploading the .HTACCESS file using your FTP client does not work (it did not work for me). I would spend days waiting for the server to update whatever it had to update and nothing happened, the CLEAN URL option remained grayed out no matter what I did.

Then I gave Godaddy's web file manager a chance and IT WORKED, it is like FTP but inside a browser, select the .HTACCESS file and update it with the new code. In my case the .HTACCESS file was empty despite uploading it at least a thousand times with a thousand variations using my FTP client.