One of the first questions I'm almost always asked is why I prefer blogs over old-style static (conventional) web sites? Potential clients especially want to know "What's in it for me?". To answer any of these questions, I think you really have to stand back and take a look at how the Internet has been changing over the years. Initially, web sites were a venue where information was displayed. You'd get a web developer (or even a designer), to create the code for your site, the content would be included and the site launched. It was a static environment, meaning the content was not changing. From time to time, a site would be redesigned and relaunched. In essence, these types of static sites were an online brochure. We can call them "static information sites". They were appealing for a few reasons, among them: They were cheaper than print media. A large audience was reached. Customized branding on the Internet, helped with marketing initiatives. These static informational sites were coded in a way where the code and the content were combined. This made it more difficult to exchange data. To illustrate this, and how the webscape has changed, please see the video below: As is evident in ...

Well, it happened again, I had a major PC systems failure (Windows). My valuable business data (all of it)  was corrupt, my PC could not boot - I couldn't even download my email! But was I worried? No! Which is probably an unexpected answer when all your client records are destroyed, right? Well, there's a hook to this story, some time ago I touched on the subject of disaster recovery with an earlier post about saving your data when disaster strikes. In that post we explored the issue of software and hardware solutions. In my case I invested in an affordable network storage unit. It's a proactive solution because all my data is regularly duplicated (automatically - I don't have to do anything) to the network accessible storage unit. After reinstalling a robust operating system (this was my last remaining Windows based PC, now every PC is Linux - Including this one), all I had to do was copy the data back off the storage unit. It even had all my email, email settings, folders, calender, etc. (I was using Thunderbird as the email client as I found I could do much more with it than with other email clients - ...

For years, I've always believed that keeping your data safe is critical. Without a safety net, there's no fast method to recreate years of blog or web site content additions and updates. I'm sure you'd agree with me right? Right! I've rarely had any issues until recently. Do you want to avoid some of these costly issues for your blog? As some of you are aware, I recently experienced two disasters that effected my blog and how I worked. The first disaster resulted in the initial loss of my blog (and several hours of work it took to write the initial content). The second resulted in the near-loss of data on my computer and a loss of my Internet connection. Both issues lost me time and cost me money. Issue #1 - Software Related The web server was configured to automatically create file and database backups every 24 hours. I even received the daily email messages, indicating the backups were created; and faithfully downloaded the new backups each day. Shortly after a I launched this blog, a scripting issue on the server caused all databases to be dropped (deleted). Normally it would be a simple fix to use the existing backups to restore ...

I spoke with a new blog owner yesterday, who almost lost a fair bit of content as the result of an intrusion. Additionally, he was locked out of his own site (which prompted the phone call). Fortunately I was able to help him avoid any further damage to his content as we were able to stop the unauthorized access in it's tracks. But what could he have done to avoid or mitigate any loss? What steps can we as bloggers take to help safeguard our valuable content? In my opinion, one issue is to maintain your own server. Do not host your blog on a shared server hosting account. Shared hosting accounts mean just that - other people (whom you don't know) also have accounts on the same server, it can increase the likelihood of an incident. To give you one simple example, I was using a shared server for a quick small web site development project about six years ago. The hosting company had some issues with the server and left it in an unprotected state (they were working on it at the time). I remember logging in (via FTP) that afternoon and had full access to the files of ...