Monthly Archives: April 2008

Backup, Backup, Backup. Did I Mention That You Should Backup?

Backing up 'Backup'I’m still kicking myself over a big mistake I made recently. A few months ago, I made some major changes to The Site of Requirement, my Harry Potter analysis and news site. I installed a copy of WordPress, moved all of the content into it, and reworked the design to take advantage of CSS instead of tables. After a few weeks of work, it was running smoothly again. My mistake? After finishing all of that work, I didn’t back it all up. I neglected to make a new backup over the following months as well.

Recently, the host the site is on put some new servers in place, and started migrating the sites to the new machines. I was unaware of this until the site stopped working. What I at first thought was just outdated DNS settings that needed to be updated proved to be far worse. The host had lost all of my files during the switch, as well as most of the database. The best they had was an older version of the database.

The backup I have contains the site before my move to WordPress, as well as a directory containing the WordPress installation, with about 80% of the work done. I should be able to get the site back up in a few days, but a few months of news posts will be AWOL, unfortunately.

The lesson here? Backup your website. Bad things will happen. Whether it’s accidental data loss, or some %@$&*# sabotaging your site. Be prepared. Make regular backups.

Edit: The database loss wasn’t as bad as I thought, luckily. I didn’t lose much at all. However, I still have to deal with the missing files.

Photo by Wysz

Reminder

No, not the Feist album. I thought I would post a quick reminder than RSS Awareness Day is the day after tomorrow. That’s May 1st, so get your posts ready if you’re participating.

Killer Domains: A Guide to Finding a Great Domain

Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com recently authored an ebook called Killer Domains. I read it recently, and it was pretty good. It teaches you what goes into a good domain name, then walks you through brainstorming domain ideas. Also included are lists of prefixes and…

GFXPoll.com

Someone recently brought a new polling service to my attention. GFXPoll.com allows you to create polls in a wide array of styles. You can even create a poll without registering (something that too many sites don’t offer). The site seems to be fairly new,…

ProBlogger’s Professional Blogging Tools A-Z

I was looking through ProBlogger’s archives a few days ago, and I came across this interesting post. A – Z of Professional Blogging Tools The huge list is, as the title suggests, an alphabetized collection of links that will benefit most bloggers, whether they…

Using CSS to Do Anything: 50+ Creative Examples and Tutorials

Noupe has done it again. Their latest post, Using CSS to Do Anything: 50+ Creative Examples and Tutorials, is a truly monster-sized list. The list includes The styling of lists Forms, and their child elements Various navigational menus CSS Image Galleries Rounded corners Speech…

Superblogger

Superblogger. Definition: Darren Rowse, Maki, John Chow, etc. A word I thought-up while writing a post today. A blogger, with a large following, who writes often, makes use of social bookmarking/networking sites, and is considered to be one of the top bloggers in a…

BlogBuzz April 26, 2008

Hosting Coupon Codes

I was stumbling around yesterday, and I found this interesting site: RetailMeNot.com is a big database of online coupon codes. They even have a large collection of codes for web hosts. I’m sure there are other areas of the site that may be beneficial…

Do You Have a Tagline?

A tagline is a short line of text that runs underneath your site’s name. It says something about your site, and adds to the first impression. In my opinion, the best taglines are both humorous and descriptive. (Of course, humor may not be appropriate…