I am taking my Macbook Pro in for repair today, so I spent most of last night backing up all the data (critical and non-critical) in case the system needs restoring or it has to be away for a while. It made me re-evaluate my backup strategy a bit.

I do the majority of my work on my Macbook pro (120Gb) on my home wireless network. I also have a Linux machine as a backup solution. This backs up to an external 250Gb hard drive overnight, using rsync (so as to only backup the changed files).

This solution is not great, and it is a bit cumbersome. I plan to replace this with a solution that will involve RAID-1 (two hard drives mirrored. If one fails nothing is lost).

There are a few ways to do this:

• I could add RAID 1 to the Linux machine. This is a little difficult as it is a tiny machine that sits underneith the TV and there is really not the room for a second hard drive.
• I could replace the external hard drive with a USB enclosure that uses RAID 1. This is not too expensive, but adds a second device which also needs space and power.
• I could invest in a NAS box, such as a Synology, QSNAP or Thecus.

BUT, it’s not that simple…

As I do most of my work on the Macbook the first and formost important thing for me is to backup that data, live data that I am working on at the time.

As I work on a wireless network I dont want to transfer 120Gb every time I backup. This leaves be two options:

• I could use a backup program that detects changes
• I could use OSX’s built in Time Machine

Time Machine takes hourly backups of the current dat, along with weekly and monthly backups as space allows. The problem is it only works (properly) using Apple Airport hardware. There are hacks around for getting it working on a normal NAS, but there are pitfalls as well.

I have experimented with rsync options and even those seem to interfere with the operation of the macbook while I am working. Time Machine (from what I see) is fairly seamless.

So…

That leaves one option, the Apple Airport Extreme.

Although it does not (as standard) use RAID the data is actually in two places anyway, the Macbook and the backup drive. This is a perfect solution for the Macbook backup, but what about archives?

Archives work a little differently. Data is passed from the Macbook to the Airport-attached hard drive. Once it is there it gets deleted from the Macbook.

This means that is the hard drive fails the data is lost… back to RAID!

After consideration I feel my best solution is to use the Apple Airport Extrme with a hardware RAID external hard drive. This means that the macbook live data is actually on 3 hard drives, and the archive data is on 2.

What do you guys use for your backup solution and archive data?

A week ago I got an email letting me know the forum software I use had released an update. As one of my sites runs on this software I planned to do the update this Sunday (today). I awoke at 8:30am and decided to crack on with it, but as I turned on my laptop I received another email… there was ANOTHER update!

“Great”, I thought!… oh… how wrong was I?!!!…

The problem was, the forum I run is quite a large one, with lots of members and a few modifications. As it is a worldwide forum there is a mod on there letting members display a little flag showing their nationality. This is a great little mod, and people like it a lot, but upon upgrade it broke! After the upgrade happened the flags were no more.

The problem

The problem is the way the forum software works is not very “mod friendly”. It’s not like WordPress where your mods are protected somewhat, modifying a forum required major surgery to the core files… not nice when it comes to upgrade time!

Anyway, all in all there were two mods that broke, the flags and the “quick reply” feature. The quick reply was an easy fix, as it only involved alterations to a single file, so fairly low maintenance, but the flags mod was a lot of work to find out what went wrong.

By the time I had finished with this fiasco it was well into the afternoon. This made me think, are these mods really worth it? Fair enough, if the version of the forum was fixed, great, but it’s not… there will always be fix released and bug patches going on, each giving the possibility of your mod breaking.

…and so…

I have learned a lot of the the past year or so, but I am learning that sometimes it is necessary to simplify things in order to give the reliability necessary to keep a site running, in order to maintain your own sanity, and not give your entire Sunday up in the quest to get “the little flags working”.

By the time I think about all the time I have spent making sure these modifications survive all the upgrades, these aren’t half expensive little flags!

I posted recently about the importance of setting the correct blog post title. This made me think of something I came across a while ago. Once again it is something quite simple yet very important, that is getting your blog post title right, first time!

Here’s why…

If you blog like I do you may blog fast and furious manner, in a quest to hit that Publish button. You may or may not give a tremendous amount of thought to checking things like spelling (you should, but then it’s easier said than done) until after it’s published.

In the case of spelling it’s not the end of the world. Enter the admin panel again… manage… posts… select… edit… save… DONE!

Where things come unstuck occasionally is changing the title, or more importantly changing the permalink that goes with it.

Why is this?

Basically, under the hood of your WordPress installation lies the UPDATE section (under settings/writing). This contains something like http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ and means when you post a blog article it updates various feeds from Google to Yahoo to Technorati.

This is all well and good, but what happens if it updates them with your latest and greatest post, only for you go back in there and change the title and permalink? That’s right, it won’t be able to find it!

I would have thought it was intelligent enough to go back in there and update these services, maybe it’s supposed to, who knows? All I know is I have looked at my stats on occasion and found attempted visits trying to find the old page, only to be greeted by a 404 error.

There are plugins out there that will handle this sort of thing and maintain a list of old pages and their corresponding new ones. Personally I find it easier just to spend a little time hovering over the Publish button, checking the permalink is correct before I submit the post.

The benefit of taking time doing this is you can craft your permalink to take out the irrelevant words, leaving a short, accurate, keyword rich description of your post.

The importance of a blog post title is something I thought I had covered before, but looking back it seems I never posted it.  The title of a post is one of the most important aspects in terms of getting your post seen. The content of the post is actually more important in terms of the total post, but if you rely on visitors from search engines then they need to arrive at the post before they can read it, right?

There are several things that dictate how well a post is ranked by the search engines, some of the most important are:

• The title of the post
• The URL of the post
• The title PROPERTY of the post (in the browser header)
• The value of the headings
• The amount of keywords in the body

The list does go on, but for the purpose of this post I will focus on the title.

If you are anything like me you will be quite enthusiastic about your blog post. When you write it you may be brimming with ideas, full of enthusiasm and excited to post. You write your post and come up with a great (sometimes funny) title to give the post the POW! factor.

This is a very easy trap to fall into, I have done this many times myself. It is easier to illustrate through an example.

Take this post… it is basically about the title of a blog post. Instead of naming it :

How important is a blog post title?

… I could have called it:

The risks of the POW factor

Ok, that’s not necessarily the best title in the world, but what I am getting at is I could use the title to make a newspaper headline type statement, to intrigue the reader and make them want to read on. There is an argument that actually that is the right way to do it, but we need to be aware that while a reader may be enthused by that, Google may not.

Of course, the holy grail is to combine the two, but in my opinion it is more important to optimise your post to allow people to find what they are searching for, not just from google, but from your internal search engine. If someone searches for this post 6 months down the line they may search for “post title”. This post will appear on the list, whereas it may not (or be lower down the list) if I gave it a funny title.

Some of this may seem like common sense, in that case great, but like a lot of these simple aspects to web design and blogging, it’s only simple once you know about it.

As always, comments (and other angles) are always appreciated.

I have recently been doing some work that I wanted to ring-fence in a password protected directory. The problem is, as soon as you put a password on a directlry WordPress gives a 404 error.

Ok, so wordpress is giving a 404 because it can’t find the directory you typed in, right?

WRONG!

The problem is actually not this at all. The problem comes from the rewrite engine WordPress uses to make search friendly URL’s. WordPress makes a .htaccess file in the root of it’s install (the root of my website, in my case) which looks like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Part of what this code does is takes any unknown URL and throws it at WordPress to sort out and server the appropriate page, or error.

In the case of my password protected page it wants to tell me about the 401 situation I am in (authentication) but my server has a default location for this, and there is no file there. When WordPress gets wind of this missing file it tries to be helpful and tell us about it, hence passing us a 404 error.

The Solution

The solution is actualy very simple. Open the .htaccess file and add the following before all the WordPress entries:

ErrorDocument 401 default

Save the file and retry to navigate to the protected directory. You will now get the popup box you were expecting in the first place, so you can enter your details and gain access as normal.

A very simple solution to a simple (but very confusing) problem.

A week ago I decided that I was going to try every piece of technology I came across on the Internet. Not become an expert in it, but at least try it out and report my findings. Today I decided to install Entrecard, a viral marketing “widget”.

First of all let me say there is a LOT of disagreement about Entrecard, it’s value to your website, general misuse, and the concept of “drop and run”. Before I go into these I will explain a bit about what it is.

Entrecard is a system whereby you create a 125×125 pixel advert for your site and “drop” it on other sites that have the Entrecard widget. If the owner of the site likes your advert they will approve it, and usually in turn will visit your site and may “drop” a card on you. This process is repeated over and over until you have approved lots of adverts. These adverts are displayed on your Entrecard widget on your website and a queued up and shown in turn.

The Good

The good thing about Entrecard is people do end up visiting sites they would not have usually visited.

Because the owner has to approve the banner you can assume the advert is at lease vaguely relevant. This is not always the case but more oftem than not it is.

You will get an increase in visitors to your site once you start to use Entrecard, and if you use it according to the guidelines (a lot of dropping) then you should gain a good amount of visitors. The value of these is debatable, and will be discussed further down.

The Bad

Here’s where it starts to get messy. There is a lot of negativity thrown at Entrecard and there are various reasons why.

Firstly, 99% of people who visit your site from an Entrecard link will be Entrecard advertisers. They will load your page, drop their card, and they will be gone within 5 seconds. They will probably not even glance at your posts. The problem with this is twofold. Firstly it takes up needless bandwidth and secondly if you have monetized your site, a visit without any clicks will hit your earnings.

Website success is often judged on visitors per day. Using Entrecard will undoubtedly increase the traffic on your site, but if these people never read the posts and never comment then your statistics are skewed. In my mind the success of a website needs to be judged by genuine visitors per day (not Entrecard) and subscribers to news feeds/newsletters.

The Ugly

More importantly than the above points is the fact that it is seen by many as amateurish and people who otherwise would take your message seriously will see you at attention seeking and unprofessional. For this reason I am unsure if I will keep it on this site.

So, what do you think?

I have only just added the feature to my site, so at present I am unsure how it will work out. From what I have heard you need to put in a lot of effort dropping cards here there and everywhere. I am unwilling to do that.

The reason I am unwilling is I am not going to drop a card on someone if I am not genuinely interested in participating on their site. I think it is rude and defeats the object of networks in general. I know a few people with Entrecards and I will drop on them, but I will also read their posts and comment on them.

For this reason I am unsure if Entrecard will work for me. I will give it a little while to bed in, see how it affects the stats, and will post an update once I have some findings to report.

What would you do if your site disappeared? You may think it is unlikely, but in reality the statistics may shock you.

Here’s some food for thought:

• 40% of Small and Medium Sized Businesses don’t back up their data at all
• 40 – 50% of all backups are not fully recoverable and up to 60% of all backups fail in general

Source: Realty Times

Whoever you host with there are always failure points, whether it is the hard drive in the server (if it is not RAID), the data-centre burning down (it does happen) or just accidental deletion of content. The general rule of thumb is if it can happen, eventually it will.

This may not have been such an issue in the early days of websites where the content was stored on your local hard drive. If the worst happened you simply need to re-upload all your HTML files and away you go. Nowadays a lot of sites are dynamic, containing pages upon pages of dynamic data updated on a regular, often daily basis.

A lot of people use their website to conduct their business, sometimes it is secondary to their main source of income, but increasingly it is becoming the main money spinner. If the site were do disappear so could the business.

Here is another interesting statistic for you:

60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster

Why am I harping on about this you may ask? Well one thing we are quite particular about at ThinkSynergy is backups. There is a daily backup on the server which is copied to 2 different locations every day. A little over the top? Maybe, but it gives us and our customers peace of mind that if the worst did happen, they would be back up and running very quickly.

What is the backup strategy of your current host? Do they do nightly backups? If the worst did happen and their data-centre burned down, would your site be on their priority list? It is easy to presume these large companies have great disaster recovery, but would you trust them with your business?

If you run your business from your website, or use your website as an income earner it is easy to sit down and put a value on the site being live. Developing a backup strategy is not something that many people get excited about, but it is vitally important. Do you have home contents insurance? I bet you do. It is equally unlikely you will ever have to use it, but you have it anyway, just in case.

If you don’t want to create a strategy yourself at least do some checks and make sure the people you host with have their own in place, it is worth it in the long run and will make sure that the business you have built up is still there next year.

Having used Stumbleupon for a month or so I thought I would write a post about my Stumble experience.

Surprisingly to me I am still a regular Stumbler. I did think this would just be another fad that I would tire of and uninstall, but it seems not. I am surprised by the quality of some of the stumbled sites out there ad find myself regularly hitting the Stumble button to pass a few minutes (or hours).

I must admit the main benefit for me is the sharing aspect. I hit Stumble a few times, find a good site, then immediately hit the “send to” button to share it. This makes it incredibly easy to surf the web with someone else, even though they are 5569 miles away!

I occasionally hit the “thumbs up” button, but mainly as it adds it to the bookmarks when you do that. In my mind making the adding of a bookmark default is a good move, otherwise I would be tempted just to hit stumble again.

After this relatively short space of time I am finding I now have a huge collection of bookmarks and have experienced an enormous amount of new sites that I never knew were out there. more than this, I now have subscriptions to a handful of great blogs which I check via RSS every day.

Thumbs up for Stumbleupon!

I happened upon a great post by Sailor at Nice2all.com about speeding up WordPress the other day. As I always like to do when I find something good, I like to leave a comment and show some appreciation. I scrolled down tot he comment button and saw an icon in the corner.

Logo designed by the guys at Biotek

I did a little research (ok, I clicked on the icon in Sailor’s sidebar) and found this post.

It is something I have thought about before. Doesn’t it seem rude that you take your time to compose a comment for someone’s site and they decide that you are not worthy of a little “link love”?

Allow me to explain

The no-follow attribute basically means that although the link works when you click on it, it is effect a dead end for Google and the search bots. This means your own site will not gain from the link you just created.

This was originally designed to prevent spamming, and yes it does occur occasionally, but to be honest it happens if you have no-follow or you don’t. There are more effective ways of tackling spam without punishing the commentors.

For this reason I have decided to implement this feature on all my blogs, so that if you leave a comment you will get a genuine, Google enabled link back to your site. It’s the least I can do considering you have given up your time to post on my site.

If you have a blog and would like to know more about it, please feel free to comment, or visit the sites I linked above.

Thanks go to Sailor at Nice2all for inspiring me to do this.

WordPress have announced the release of version 2.6 of it’s software. There are some major changes in this release that will enhance the user experience.

Here are a few:

Press me now

A bookmark that when you press it opens up a new window and allows you to grab content from that page and enter it into your blog post.

Gears

This allows you to store copies of your javascript and CSS files locally on your laptop, amking working on your blog easier. This is great for low bandwidth connections ling GPRS.

Word Count

There is now a live word counter on the right of the screen… useful for some I guess.

Versioning

This is a nifty feature. WordPress now stores versions of posts, so you can go back and see what was done when, restore to previous versions, or even compare two versions. This is a great feature and very well done!

Gallery adjustments

If you upload multiple images into a gallery on your post you can now re-order them using drag and drop. Simple yet effective!

Theme Previews

You can preview what a theme will look like before you set it live. This is useful if you want to see what a theme will look like before you unleash it on the public.

There are a few more features in the 2.6 release that I won’t go into right now. If you want to know more drop a comment on this post and I will do my best to answer.

We will be upgrading all our customer’s WordPress installations over the coming weeks, if you would like further details on this please drop us a line.