If I think for a moment about what it would mean to me to lose the papers I’ve written, the research I’ve accumulated, the photographs I’ve taken, the software I’ve bought and downloaded with no backup CD, and the personal or financial information I store on my computer … I can’t even imagine what it would be like to try and get that all back. And the worst thing about it would be the feeling of a whole lot of creative energy getting flushed down the drain, irreversible and unrecoverable.

Up until about two years ago, my backup strategy was to copy files that I cared about between my desktop and my laptop, using a software package called Laplink. I stopped using Laplink when Microsoft released SyncToy — a very decent (and cheap (as in FREE)) software utility that does a great job of synchronizing files between two drives, accurately recognizing changes on both drives and taking them into account.

This strategy worked well until I cranked up my photography hobby again, after buying my first DSLR. It didn’t take long before the pictures I was storing on my desktop were too big to synchronize to the laptop (which is about five years old and had a small hard drive to begin with). About eight months ago, I added a 500 gigabyte external drive to my desktop, planning to use it as a backup drive. As soon as I realized how fast the drive was, however, I decided to offload all the photos from the desktop’s hard drive (which was running low on space too) and work with them directly from the external drive. But that left me with no backup strategy for the photos, so I bought a second external drive of the same size, to use as a backup. I’ve been using SyncToy for about eighteen months to "mirror" all of my photographs, as well as my Word documents and other creations (along with MP3s and software I’ve purchased) to this second drive.

But of course this strategy has a big flaw: The backup drive is physically located right near the computer, so anything that damaged the computer might damage the drive also. At least when I was backing up to the laptop (over a wireless network), the two computers were located in different rooms in my house, mitigating, to some extent, the chance for physical damage affecting both machines. I have looked at online backup utilities off and on for several years, and tried and rejected all of them as dissatisfying to me for one reason or another.

Then yesterday I read this article by Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests:

BackBlaze: Why Do You Make It So Hard To Like You?

And also read some of the additional coverage here:

Backblaze’s One-Click Online Backup Opens To The Public

Backblaze is a recent entry into the online storage market, offering unlimited online backup space for $5.00 a month. I set up an account this morning and, as I write this, the easily-installed backup software is running in the background. It automatically selected about 50 gigabytes of data to back up; I reduced that to about 30 gigabytes by excluding the second external drive (which is a backup anyway) using the software’s configuration screens. The software tells me it will take about 10 days to complete the first full backup … which seems like a long time, I know, but keep in mind that upload speeds for DSL or cable connections are only a fraction of download speeds. (If you didn’t know this and want to see what I mean, your ISP may display that information on a modem or network configuration screen, or Backblaze provides a speed test you can use here: Bandwidth Speed Test to Backblaze).

Tony didn’t like Backblaze for one main reason: you can only specify folders to exclude from the backup, not folders to include. The CEO of Backblaze — Gleb Budman — responded in the comments on Tony’s article that they found that users didn’t want the include option, because they didn’t know what to include. I’m not surprised by that; working in IT, I see how often people seem to lose files and folders — and by "lose" I mean they just can’t figure out where they put them, mainly because (in my opinion) the save options in most Windows programs are so inconsistent that it’s easy to save something to an unexpected location and not even realize it.

I would, however, like to see Backblaze allow me to exclude multiple folders at a time. That is, it would be nice to be presented a list where I can checkbox a slew of folders at once. As it stands right now, Backblaze is going to back up dozens of folders that I wouldn’t think twice of excluding from a backup, because I wouldn’t use them to restore and wouldn’t need them if I had to replace my computer. As a comparison, Backblaze has selected about 10 gigabytes more data to backup than I currently backup myself. The ability to easily exclude multiple folders from the backup would be a nice compromise between Tony’s view of the software and Gleb Budman’s. It’s certainly not preventing me from using the product, of course; it just means that Backblaze is taking about a third longer for my initial backup than I would consider necessary.

One thing about Backblaze that I really like is that it does backup the contents of connected USB drives (not all online backup companies offer this capability), which is important to me since my photographs are housed on external drives only and will no longer fit on either of my desktop’s hard drive partitions. Earlier I was wondering how Backblaze would handle the external drive, and if it would just run continuously for hours, but I learned — from a response I got to a technical support question I sent to Backblaze support earlier today (fast response for a Sunday afternoon!) — that the software makes a copy of each file on the C: drive, then transmits it, then deletes the copy — which would give the USB drive the frequent rest periods it probably needs.

Backblaze doesn’t function as a network drive to your computer, and doesn’t claim to — so if that’s what you need, you’ll have to look elsewhere. It’s also not a drive image, in that you couldn’t boot from a Backblaze restore. But we’re talking being able to recover your creative work here, not building computers.

If you need to restore something, there’s a web interface to your account that shows your files in the same folder arrangement they were in on your local drives, where you can select files to restore and create a zip file to download. You can also purchase a DVD or USB drive containing the files you need to restore, but — since the DVD is $99 and the USB drive is $189 (I’m guessing you get to keep the drive) — you wouldn’t use those options if all you wanted was a lost file or two. I tried the download-zip option, and it worked fine.

Overall, I like what I see so far, quite a lot. And I like that it was easy to install, didn’t require two hours of technical diddling to get it running, and is just doing it’s job without bothering me. (I think there might be a few user-interface tweaks in order, but I’ll hold on those observations until I’ve spent more time with the software and the web site.) I’m definitely impressed that it’s been running in the background all this time — while I’ve been writing this post, tabbing around the net with Firefox, checking e-mail, and playing a few tunes — and it has still managed to safely tuck away about 400 decent-sized files, in synch with the 4 gigabyte per day upload volume that the speed test utility predicted, and without interrupting me or slowing me down one bit. If you’ve been thinking about putting together your backup strategy, then Backblaze is definitely worth a look.

More later; I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on this and let you know how it goes. Maybe we’ll have a party when the initial backup finishes….

Thanks for reading!

WordPress 2.6.2

Release details describing the fixes are here:

WordPress Trac query for version 2.6.2

More information from Lorelle on WordPress:

WordPress 2.6.2 Mandatory Upgrade

and from Keith Dsouza:

WordPress 2.6.2 Released, Mandatory Update

Once again, I recommend Keith’s WordPress Automatic Upgrade, having just run it on both of my sites with complete success. I can’t read the upgrade instructions as fast as Keith’s plugin takes care of the upgrade for me….

Good luck upgrading!

WordPress 2.6.1

Release details describing the 60+ fixes included here:

WordPress Trac query for version 2.6.1

Download here:

Download WordPress

I’ve run the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to upgrade both of my sites, and all’s well.

1. Pages can be assigned a page order. I think this capability existed in the earlier version, but I noticed that those template elements that display links to pages actually respect that order now … so if you want pages that are displayed in a drop down menu or in the template (depending on your template capabilities) to appear in a certain order, you can control that.
2. Categories are much easier to manage. Better yet, you can create new categories (and even assign a parent relationship) on the fly as you’re writing a new post. If you use Windows Live Writer, WL allows you to do the same thing, and updates the categories on your site accordingly.
3. I know tags have been added, though I think in a previous version. I haven’t explored their usage yet, but I do see you can have WordPress convert your categories to tags, so I may try that soon.
4. I also haven’t explored the new Media Library, since I upload any images via Windows Live Writer and I don’t know how, or even if, the two work together. However, there’s a nice video tutorial on the Media Library here: Managing the WordPress Media Library
5. The way plugins can now be managed may be my favorite new feature. When you first go you’re WordPress dashboard, you may see a bright red number above the "Plugins" link on the right side of the Admin panel — to let you know that one or more of your plugins has a new release available. On the plugins page itself, you can choose to download the update or install it automatically — both of which I’ve done several times, and it works well. You can also now delete a plugin from this page, rather than go to your web host to delete it. Recently active (but currently inactive) and inactive plugins are separated from the active plugins list, making the plugin page much better organized.
6. A few other miscellaneous features I like:
   - You can now see post word counts when writing posts (helps keep me from writing too much (yeah, right!!)).
   - You can drag the "Press this" bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, then use it to create a post from any web page.
   - Links to related dashboard pages are available from many more of the individual screens.
   - WordPress creates post revisions that you can see, use, and compare to the current version of an article.
   - WordPress now handles e-mail notifications that WP 2.0.2 couldn’t handle without additional plugins.

Now to the really fun stuff….

I’m using quite a few plugins now, many more than I was using on this site when it was at the previous WordPress version, so for this article I’ve separated them into three groups. Content Management Plugins are those I’m using to control what content is displayed on various pages, and how much. Comments Plugins include those that improve visitors’ experiences with respect to leaving, reading, or following comments. Miscellaneous Plugins include those that make site administration and management a little easier.

In the following, I’ve linked to the developer’s plugin home page, as provided on the WordPress plugins section of the Dashboard. I thought that you might find that more useful, as there is typically more information about the plugin, the developer, and reactions and other commentary from many users there that’s more detailed than in the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can download plugins from either place, though occasionally you may see a beta version or brand new release on the developer’s page that’s not yet released to the Directory.

Content Management Plugins

These are all new to me, and I found most of them while trying to decide how I wanted my photoblog to look. Advanced Category Excluder, for example, lets you decide what categories you want to hide from certain site sections or functions. You can selectively exclude categories from the archive pages (that is, the pages displayed when your visitor selects a single category or date), from the home page, from RSS feed posts or comments, or from searches. On this site, I’m only using this plugin (right now, anyway) to exclude the category internet clippings from the home page. I use this category solely for bookmarks I’ve saved on delicious that are posted back to this site by the delicious daily blog posting function. I felt like the delicious posts created here distracted from the flow of the main page articles, but I still wanted to include them and provided a separate link to those articles under "Navigation" in the sidebar.

Custom Query String Reloaded provides a way to control the amount of content that’s displayed in several sections of the blog. By default, the WordPress setting (on the Admin panel’s Reading tab) for "Blog pages show at most" defines the number of posts that appear on the main page and all category or archive pages. Custom Query String Reloaded lets you override that based on different criteria: archives, authors, categories,  search pages, RSS feeds, pages, and tags. On this site, I am overriding my setting of five posts on the main page with 20 posts for the category and monthly archive pages, and 40 posts for the category internet clippings. On afewgoodlenses, I have set the home page to display only two posts to draw attention to specific recent photographs, but set the various archive pages to show 20 posts, making the site function more like a gallery or a content management system. With Custom Query String Reloaded, you can also set the post order to ascending or descending date, whichever you prefer.

Last night I added the Last.fm RPS plugin to this site; you can see the results directly under "Listen to My Music" in the sidebar. The Last.fm RPS plugin displays album covers for music I’ve recently listened to on that site (or when using Windows Media Player on my computer). The Last.fm radio widget and the moving album cover images below that are available using scripts you can get from Last.fm.

Microkid’s Related Posts is one of my favorite plugins, and I will gradually deploy it all throughout the site, including archive articles. This plugin adds related post functionality to the WordPress Write pages, letting you search through your posts by keyword and include a list of related posts. I like this particular plugin because connecting posts is partly automated and partly manual, giving me control over the relationships I want to create. And, for more fun, if you are writing Post A and create a related entry to Post B, the plugin automatically updates Post B to contain the related post link back to Post A. Grrreeeaaatttt You can see an example of this plugin in action at the end of this article.

Snazzy Archives lets you create an image-based representation of your posts on any page you want. The plugin is very simple and straightforward to use and works great. Click here for Snazzy Archives on this site; or click here for Snazzy Archives on my photoblog — where it’s even more visually compelling (or will be, once I get more posts with photos out there). 

The last of the content management plugins — WP-Print — reformats the post for printing. I originally installed it because I wanted to be able to print previous posts when I was working on a series of articles like this one. I hope my readers occasionally benefit from it too.

Comments Plugins

Yay! I was finally able to deploy some decent plugins for comments on this site. So, you know, leave some comments — and tell all your friends to do the same!

Better Comments Manager adds excellent functionality to the WordPress Admin panel from which you can manage comments much more effectively. Among other improvements over the standard WordPress comments functions, you can reply to comments directly from the Admin panel rather than visiting your site. You can also edit, delete, approve or unapprove, view all comments on a post, and mark comments as spam.

Brian’s Threaded Comments lets visitors post comments by replying to others, and displays the relationships by indenting each comment after the first. I also just like the way it makes comments look on the site, much cleaner and easier to read. Better Comments Manager also integrates well with this plugin, allowing you to reply as a threaded comment when using the Better Comments Manager Admin panel enhancement.

Comment E-mail Responder is the only comments plugin I used on the old version of the site. I always liked the fact that it would allow me to reply to a specific comment (from the article itself) and it would shoot an e-mail to the respondent. I may use it less now, because I also installed Subscribe to Comments — which does exactly what it’s name says, lets visitors subscribe to e-mail notifications containing new comments. I figure if readers want the responses, they’ll subscribe, so will use Comment E-mail Responder judiciously.

These four comments plugins should help improve any visitor’s experience, and help kick start conversations and keep them going. I always liked sites that I saw that employed Brian’s Threaded Comments and Subscribe to Comments in particular, and I’m glad to now be able to include them here on mine.

Miscellaneous Plugins

I am of course using one of the standard WordPress plugins for managing spam — Akismet — on both of my sites. I’ve always been impressed with Akismet, and it seems that if the spam-catching capabilities in Microsoft Outlook or in my ISP’s spam filters were even half as good as Akismet, junk e-mail would be a thing of the past. I often check what Akismet marks as spam just to see how it’s doing, and in the nearly 15,000 spam-catches Akismet has made, I only noticed one legitimate comment show up. You can’t get much better than that….

WordPress 2.6 introduced revisioning and autosave functionality. A revision was created every time a post was saved, and autosave had some timer in it that automatically saved a post (and maybe saved it as a revision) at specified intervals. Since I use Windows Live Writer for almost all of my blog writing, the revision and autosave feature didn’t interest me that much. And, oddly, the revisions were not displayed on the Write page on this site (though they were on my other site), even though I could see them in my database. If you don’t like these features, you can install and activate Disable Revisions and Autosave as I have.

The No Self Pings plugin eliminates something about writing articles in WordPress that has always annoyed me  — the creation of a pingback (which would appear as a comment on a post) whenever I linked to my own site from inside an article. So, in effect, it makes it unnecessary to go back and clean up after your newly posted article pings your site.

Broken Link Checker scans all your articles and their internal links to verify that none of them are broken. I haven’t kept this plugin continuously active, though did check my entire site after upgrading and changing many of my categories, and, happily, there were no broken links.

I described Theme Test Drive in the previous article in this series. It’s a useful and excellent tool, allowing you to make and check out theme changes before committing them for your visitors to see.

Finally, and as I also mentioned in the previous article, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is nothing short of a miracle as far as I’m concerned. I almost look forward to the next version of WordPress, just so I can run it again.

That’s it for the plugin list. I know this has turned out to be a very long article, but I thought some folks might benefit from my experiences with them and from the reasons I’m using some of them. I’m looking into a few others, but haven’t installed them yet, including:

All-in-One SEO Pack, which I’ll activating and setting up soon;
Google XML Sitemaps, which I’ll install as soon as I understand why I need a sitemap; and
Tubepress, which will bring my selected YouTube content to the sidebars.

… so will have more to say about those after a while….

Thanks for reading!

I installed version 2.5 on afewgoodlenses first, as a "from scratch" installation that I took on mainly because I had never loaded WordPress to a host myself, and wanted to learn how to do it. My older site, this one, had originally been a Yahoo! one-click install, and as a result I had no idea how the installation process worked. I’d been poking around for about six months, digging up whatever I could on what I might expect upgrading the Yahoo! install myself. While there’s a lot of information out there, the key to a successful Yahoo! install or upgrade is spelled out in this article on the WordPress Codex:

User:MichaelH/Installation Notes/Yahoo

The short version is simply that Yahoo! doesn’t set up a user’s MySql database with access rights that allow a WordPress install or upgrade to run successfully, and this article explains how to address that. For those who are squeamish about such things, I’ll just say that I’m a database novice in many ways; while I have plenty of database design experience and can poke around and write some SQL queries, I had no idea about the database that drives WordPress or about database administration utilities like "phpmyadmin." Nevertheless, by reading this article (several times!) and following it carefully, I was able to set the database rights correctly, install WordPress on afewgoodlenses, upgrade afewgoodlenses from version 2.5 to 2.6, and upgrade the original Yahoo! install of this site from 2.0.2 to 2.6.

I did both upgrades using Keith Dsouza’s WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin, a heaven-sent plugin if there ever was one. I sat here at my desk one Friday evening deciding, finally, that if WPAU upgraded afewgoodlenses successfully, I was going to dive in and try it on this site. Both upgrades, obviously, were highly successful. I do mention a couple of quirky things that happened in the previous article — but they were minor and didn’t stop the show from going forward at all.

Since this site’s old theme worked quite well with WP 2.6, I spent a long time (days, in fact) trying out different themes until I found one I really liked. I had previously chosen a theme (called Munch) developed by miloIIIVII for afewgoodlenses, and found many of her themes right up my alley from a design perspective. I ended out choosing a second miloIIIVII theme for this site, the Garden theme. I couldn’t be more pleased with the appearance and functionality of both sites, and I certainly hope my visitors like them too.

While trying out different themes, I found the WordPress theme preview function (that runs automatically when you select a new theme) very useful. Once I started migrating changes from the old theme, however, I used a great plugin called Theme Test Drive by Vladimir Prelovac. Theme Test Drive lets you activate and use a new theme while you’re signed in at the admin panel, but visitors to your site see the original theme. With Theme Test Drive, you can make changes and apply them to your new theme, leaving the old one intact until you’re done. And unlike the WordPress theme preview, the theme as presented by Theme Test Drive is fully functional, so you can test as much as you want before committing your changes.

I had quite a few customizations to my old theme, more than I realized. I had about thirty distinct changes to move over, and it took a few hours but was really quite painless. I still have some tidying up to do on both sites, but both are fully functional. I don’t have any significant advice to give about migrating customizations, other than take your time and be patient … and, before you start, make sure you have a copy of the unmodified theme so you can, if necessary, easily replace a file. My fingers flutter all over the keyboard a lot, and you’d by surprised how easy it is to accidentally paste something over the entire contents of a theme file and hit save before you can stop yourself. The backup is good insurance, and it’s a good idea to do it again after you’ve migrated your changes and gotten the site running. Oh, and remember to indicate in the file itself where you’ve made changes, to make them easy to find if you need to change or remove them. Just keep in mind that any comments you key in may be visible to anyone who uses a function like "view page source" in Firefox when they access your site.

This is getting quite long (no surprise to any of my regular readers, I’m sure), so I’ll break here and pick up on the plugins in more detail tomorrow, along with more on WP 2.6. I ended out installing about a dozen plugins that I could never use before (either because of the database issue I described above, or because they weren’t compatible as far back as WP 2.0.2). All of them give me much more control of the site’s appearance, navigation, links, and functionality. I’m sure I’ll add more as time goes on, but the one’s I’ve got running so far have made it possible to do things with both sites that I had wanted to do all along with this one, but never could….

Stay tuned… and thanks, as always, for stopping by….

Upgrading this site — which was at version 2.0.2 and was a Yahoo! install originally — also went quite well despite a couple of minor problems. The plugin wouldn’t activate at first, though I’ve experienced that on occasion with other plugins so I know it has nothing to do with the plugin itself. It’s either a Yahoo! hosting issue or a WordPress 2.0.2 issue, which, strangely, seems to happen more often when I access the plugin panel with Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. So even though Firefox is my default browser, switching to IE got the plugin activated and I was able to continue.

The upgrade plugin does two backups at the very start, and provides links to download the zip files it creates to your computer. The links didn’t work; Yahoo! kept returning a 404 page-not-found error, so I used FTP (FileZilla, an excellent FTP utility) to locate and download the zip files myself. After this, the remaining steps in the upgrade completed normally, in about five minutes.

I was surprised — though I’m not sure why — that the theme I’m currently using still worked. I hadn’t expected that, had chosen a new theme to replace it, and will probably still do so when I can spend a few hours (or days, which is more likely) customizing it.

I did run into two problems that required correction. First, I was unable to navigate the site using the “previous” link at the bottom of the page, which turned out to be a problem with the permalinks. I don’t know why this problem occurs, but I think it has to do with the way Yahoo! handles permalinks, which are structured as “friendly links” containing the day a post is created and the post title. Recreating them didn’t work, though setting them to the WordPress default style did work. Switching to the default permalink style, however, meant that all my internal linking was busted, and any external links to posts or pages on my site would no longer work. I found a solution to the problem here…

Updating Permalinks when moving to WordPress 2.5

… which consisted of installing and activating the plugin Tony Adam describes and recreating the original permalink structure. I have no idea what “canonical redirects” are, but the solution worked great!

The second problem, a strange one, was that none of my category descriptions came over from the old version of the site. The WordPress categories panel showed a couple dozen blank lines instead of the categories, and even displayed the number of posts in each (blank!) category. I wasn’t able to find a solution for that problem that I understood how to employ, so I ended out deleting all the blank categories, creating fresh ones, and reassigning categories to each of the posts. With about 90 articles on this site, it took me a couple of hours to get it done, which wasn’t too bad but certainly wouldn’t have been an appealing option if I had hundreds of posts.

So… overall I think the upgrade was a smashing success, and, with that (and quite a bit of non-blogging life-stuff that has kept me busy for the past few months) behind me, please stay tuned while I catch up on my networking activities and start churning out some new content.

Thanks, as always, for reading and for stopping by….

Here’s a nice article with some tips on speeding up your load time, where I learned about Numion’s Stopwatch tool — a nifty utility that can show you how long it takes to load any web page.  Another one I came across does a in-depth diagnosis of your page and displays optimization suggestions; it’s the Web Page Analyzer.

It was interesting to try the tools with several browsers, and see the performance variations. Firefox consistently came in as the slowest — by four to six seconds, sometimes more. Internet Explore was next, and Opera — which I just started using on occasion a couple of weeks ago — was the fastest by far, loading my main page nearly 50% faster than Firefox.  Firefox still rocks, though.

Stay tuned….

The tool is available here and it described in more detail by its creator, Paul Stamatiou, on his site, here.

Below is a slideshow of my photographs from the Atlanta History Center. You can move the mouse toward the top of the slideshow to control the display and speed, and toward the bottom to select individual photos from the set. Or, click on any photo to stop the slideshow and get links to my Flick account.

I seriously love the way this thing works!!