Discovered on Dominik Deobald’s blog here:

Did You Know?

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!

So, here are a few related articles and sites that I came across yesterday:

From Computerworld:

Collider test called a ‘great milestone of mankind’ – "Today’s successful test run of a massive particle collider is being called ‘one of the great engineering milestones of mankind.’ On Wednesday morning, just outside of Geneva, scientists shot a particle beam fully around a 17-mile loop in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Twenty years after development of the collider began, a particle beam made the full journey around the accelerator for the first time. It’s a forebear to the time when scientists will accelerate two particle beams toward each other at 99.9% of the speed of light…."

Linked from Popular Science, here’s an amazing set of virtual reality photographs:

Peter McCready VR Photography of the Large Hadron Collider

The photos in the gallery may take a little while to load, but once loaded you can mouse in all directions and see left, right, up, down, forward, backward, and zoom in and out.

Also from Popular Science:

It’s Christmas for Physicists! – "If you somehow managed to avoid seeing the comic, listening to the rap or reading anything in the all out media blitz, then let me be the first to tell you that earlier today the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most power particle accelerator, began operation. Scientists hope that the experiments conducted in the $9 billion dollar accelerator will help them discover the mysterious Higgs boson. The Higgs boson, colloquially referred to as the ‘God particle,’ is the hypothetical particle that imbues matter with mass, and finding it (or not finding it) will have profound implications on the world of physics…."

And from the Boston Globe’s consistently excellent photography blog, The Big Picture, a series of images of the collider inside and out, here:

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready.

I just spent three hours messing with my WordPress plugins and debugging the site modifications I put in recently, assuming I had done something to cause Internet Explorer (though not Firefox or Opera) to go in the ditch whenever this site was accessed. Block of code by block of code, I plodded through all my modifications, adding them back one little bit at a time … until I discovered it was the SiteMeter statistics script that was making Internet Explorer fail. Of course the SiteMeter script was in the last of the three sidebars, at the very end… because, well, that’s where most people put it!

Internet Explorer kept putting up an error that said "Internet Explorer can’t open the internet site http://www.afewgoodpens.com." It was only after I pulled out the SiteMeter script that I tried to go to their home page … and got the same error message, referencing their site. As of a few minutes ago, it was still happening.

More information here, including tips on removing the script and shortcuts to Google searches showing wide coverage of the problem:

Sitemeter Crashing Web Sites Using Internet Explorer on August 1, 2008

Google Search: sitemeter internet explorer

Google Blog Search: sitemeter internet explorer

As if keeping up with a blog or website wasn’t time-consuming enough….

Update:

On Saturday afternoon, SiteMeter posted an explanation and apology here:

SiteMeter IE Issues Resolved

I won’t be using SiteMeter on this site any longer. I’ve switched to Google Analytics.

job_name: This can be any name you want.

out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.

out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.

out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this WordPress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for WordPress, for example, on the WordPress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.

out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).

out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.

out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In WordPress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."

That’s it! Easy!

Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.

You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.

Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.

This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.

First, you’ll now see "Print this" at the top of each article. The print capability is made possible by the WP-Print WordPress plugin developed by Lester Chan. It does a really nice job of formatting posts for printing, and has three configuration options that let you choose whether or not to include comments, images, and a list of all links referenced in the article. I looked at several other options before choosing this one, and I’m very satisfied with it. I use it personally when I’m writing a new article based on some previous content, since I find it easier to work from a printed version — especially in the case of some of my longer articles. If you’re a WordPress blogger and you want to provide your readers with print options, check out Chan’s plugin page  where there are several versions you can download.

Second, I’ve changed content in the far right side for my Flickr photos, so that you can now choose to view the photographs as slideshows like you could before, or can also view the related Flickr page as a complete collection. It occurred to me that some folks might not care for the slideshows, so this was a good way to link to the photo pages by collection rather than always defaulting to slideshows.

Finally, as my friend Audee notes in her comment on my article about Zoo Atlanta, I’m now sending my site through FeedBurner and have incorporated various "feed flares" at the bottom of each article. You can also now subscribe to my feed by e-mail, and subscribe to posts and comments. I’m still experimenting with some of the flares as well as the advertising, so different elements may come and go as I check out some of the sites I’m now encouraging people to submit my articles to.

I did discover, unfortunately, that there is a known issue using FeedBurner with Yahoo! web hosting. Attempts to use my old feed URL, which was:

http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/feed

should automatically redirect to the new FeedBurner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/afewgoodpens

but it doesn’t, and displays a "document has moved" error which points to the old feed URL (going nowhere, therefore). As you can see from the description of the problem on the FeedBurner forum, there is no solution available yet. I found that this meant two things for my site.

First, if anyone was subscribing to my feed with the original URL, it would no longer work. If you’re one of my subscribers, and that happened to you … my apologies. Had I realized this was happening, I would have posted something announcing the change first.

Second, my account on services like MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog needed to be updated. MyBlogLog uses the feed URL to fetch new posts to display on its site, so I had to update my account to point to the FeedBurner URL. Easy.

Blogcatalog, however, uses RSS autodiscovery to locate a site’s feed, and that was a bit of a problem since autodiscovery tried to use the old feed URL — which should have redirected to FeedBurner but did not. I don’t really understand how all this works, but I’ve concluded that the WordPress code normally handles the redirect, yet something about Yahoo’s hosting prevents that from working normally. I ended out adapting the RSS autodiscovery tips  and modifying WordPress’s header.php file with the FeedBurner URL hardcoded. Hardcoding like this is never the best solution, but it will hold me up until a permanent fix becomes available.  In any case, it appears to have worked; my account page on Blogcatalog was reporting an error finding my feed, but has since updated to show a successful discovery and also shows the FeedBurner URL as the feed URL.

Got a headache yet? I do … this stuff never seems to just fall into place quite right, does it?

I’m a little disappointed that this is another quirk I’ve run into that’s specific to Yahoo! web hosting and their WordPress implementation. While I have to be fair and say that I’ve never had a problem with my site or its availability at Yahoo!, site performance and availability is but a minimum requirement for a web host these days. In my opinion, Yahoo! oversold their hosting service to newbie WordPress bloggers like myself by making it so easily available, by implying that they would update the WordPress installation but never doing it, and by nearly running from the room screaming if you call their  support line and even use "WordPress" in a sentence. They could have a kick-ass blog hosting service, if they’d just make an effort to actually support WordPress users — something that might even make then unique in the industry. Are you listening, Yahoo!? Call me, let’s talk about it….

Oh, well, enough about that … the weekend’s here and Atlanta weather is supposed to be sunny with temperatures in the 60s … what could be better than that?

I’ve used both Newsgator Online (which has been free all along) as well as FeedDemon (which used to cost 30 bucks annually) for over a year now, having switched to the Newsgator products from Bloglines. I’ve never regretted the switch at all, and both the online and installed versions of their readers are fast, full of useful functions and navigation capabilities, and just fun to use.  And they synchronize with each other, so you can keep up with your reading from any computer anywhere, and either tool will always know how you handled your feeds with the other.

I also use Newsgator Online to build and maintain the My Blogroll and My News pages for this site. You can read more about how to do that in these two articles:

Creating a Semi-Automatic Newsgator Blogroll on Your WordPress Blog

Spreading the News

Check out Feld’s article, poke at the links a little, and give Newsgator a try. You can even subscribe to afewgoodpens just to see how things work!

Update: I just wanted to add a link to this post by Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, highlighting some of the differences between using a desktop and a web-based feedreader. As Bradbury points out, one of the great strengths of FeedDemon is the way it functions as a full-featured browser, allowing you to switch from reading feeds to visiting web sites instantly within the same session and windows. I originally used the online version more than the desktop version, but have recently switched, preferring the speed and flexibility of the desktop version when I’m on my computer at home, and typically using the online version only when I’m on a computer where I can’t install the software locally.

The study is certainly worth examining in detail; one of the things I noticed immediately was this:

The three top categories for news stories presented by the media outlets the study examined were: foreign news stories, disasters and accidents, and U.S. foreign affairs. The three top categories among the first three user-driven sites listed above were technology and science, lifestyle, and government.

I might have liked to see technology and science separated for the purposes of the study, though I can understand the difficulties in making that separation. I would expect, however, that the technology-orientation of user-selected stories was stronger than that of science. Regardless, it’s not at all surprising to me that stories tagged on sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, and Digg are heavily weighted toward technology: I think the simple fact that the technology is still new to so many people is reflected in a sometimes restless and nearly frantic gathering around stories that help us all understand it and use it better.  I know I’m abstracting from personal experience here, possibly a little too much, but when I look at at my own stories on del.icio.us, I see a pattern that very closely mirrors the results of the study. Why? Well, because like so many people I’m trying to understand how to use the technologies, trying to find the best ways to use them, and I’m still asking myself questions like “What the hell is StumbleUpon for anyway?”

As is the case with all emerging technologies, though, this discovery phase is only temporary (good luck defining “temporary”); and if the authors conduct the study again in a few years, I would be very surprised if the categories of user-tagged stories don’t start to shift. While it may still not necessarily reflect the selections being made by traditional media, I’ll bet you’ll see a convergence between the two. The study lays some excellent groundwork for the future research; and that may even be more valuable even than it’s current conclusion:

For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researchers, journalists and of course, citizens.

Instead of selecting the “Blogroll” function for the locations you have created in Newsgator Online, you select “Headlines.” On the Headline settings screen, you activate the headlines script with a click for “Check here to enable Headlines settings for this location.” You can then specify the number of posts to be displayed by the headline script and the maximum number of characters for each headline. I currently have mine set for 7 headlines per location, with 50 characters each, which I may tweak a little for appearance or clarity. Note that you can also alter the layout of the headlines by removing or rearranging individual elements, such as the date and time.

This will probably be the last significant change to the layout of my site for a while, since — as I mentioned here – my classes begin again in a few days, and I’ll want to shift my focus to writing content related to that experience rather than spending time on technical changes. But I did want to send out a little credit and thanks, once again, to Lorelle VanFossen: the idea of adding options for readers to leave my site while still following my interests came from a comment she made on Dawud Miracle’s article Why You Want To Link To Other Blogs. Lorelle wrote:

I love the fact that blogging is the only industry in which you get more readers by sending them away from your business…. If they like what they find when you send them away, they come back for more, and bring their friends.

Incredible. We’re changing the whole concept of marketing.

This observation has stuck with me since I read it, especially because I’m so fascinated by the ways in which blogging, social networking, and technological change in general are affecting individuals and their lives, opening up significant opportunities to pursue their passions in ways that were not available a few short decades ago. In addition to changing the whole concept of marketing, every time a blog writer posts a new article or opens another part of their life to their readers, they’re contributing to the radical cultural and social changes we’re all living in right now … and adding this new out-links to my site is my way of going along for the ride.

The method I came up with takes advantage of the ability to create custom feed “locations” in Newsgator. Individual feeds can be associated with any (and multiple) locations, and Newsgator provides a script that, once embedded in a WordPress file, displays all the links associated with that location.

Here’s how my feeds are organized in Newsgator. As you can see, I have numerous folders, each with multiple feeds.

I created a separate Newsgator location for each folder, then associated that folder’s feeds with the location. It may sound a little complicated, but it’s really not, and offers several conveniences for maintaining the blogroll that make it worth setting up.

Below are the steps you can follow to do the same thing. In this example, I’m creating a blogroll for the feeds listed in the “Science and Nature” Newsgator folder.

1. Select “Settings” on the Newsgator Online menu bar.

2. Select the “Edit Locations” tab.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the display and enter the name you want to assign to this location in the “Create location” box. (I use “Blogroll” plus the folder names for the location names; but since there is no technical relationship between the folder and location names, you can call them anything you want.) After typing in a name, press “Add.”

4. Scroll down to the location you just created. On the left of the screen, you will see “New subscriptions will be automatically added to this location. Click to change.” Click the underlined text then scroll back down to the location if necessary. You will now see “New subscriptions will NOT be automatically added to this location.” Changing this option ensures that feeds aren’t associated with the blogroll whenever you subscribe to a new one.

5. Select “Feeds” and then select “Uncheck all” on the Edit Location display. Then scroll around and select the feeds you want to associate with this location. Finally, scroll to the bottom of the display and select “Update”.

6. When Edit Locations reappears, scroll to your new location again, and select “Blogroll”. Click the check box to the left of “Click here to enable Blogroll settings for this location.”

7. In the box toward the bottom of the screen, you will see this:

   <a href=”$xmlurl$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   “$xmlrul$” directs the script to the RSS link for the feeds. Change it to “$link$” so that the generated links point to the feeds’ websites (home pages) rather than the RSS links. It should look like this after you make your changes:

   <a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a><br/>

   You can also format the links by making changes to this line of code. By default, a single blank line (<br/>) will be inserted after the link when it appears on your blogroll. In my case, it was more appropriate to format the links as list elements, with the <li> and </li> tags, like this:

   <li><a href=”$link$” target=”_blank”>$title$</a></li>

   Once you’ve made the changes you want, scroll down and select “Save Changes.” Scroll back to the location, once again select “Blogroll” and leave the window or tab open for now.

8. In a new browser window or tab, log on to your WordPress blog, select the Presentation tab, then the Theme Editor tab. Select the theme file where you will want the blogroll to appear from the files on the right; in my case, I updated sidebar.php so the blogroll appears in the column next to my posts.

9. Scroll to the area where you will want the blogroll to be displayed, and insert the following four lines of code (line three is a blank line):

   <h2><?php_ e(‘Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
   <ul>

   </ul>

   “Science and Nature” will be formatted with the heading level 2 style because of the <h2> and </h2> tags.

10. Return to the Newsgator tab or window you left open earlier, and copy the script to the blank link in the code above.  The result will look like this:

    <h2><?php_ e(‘Science and Nature’); ?></h2>
    <ul>
    <script src=http://services.newsgator.com/
    ngws/Blogroll.aspx?uid=nnnnnn&mid=##></script>
    </ul>

    (Note that “nnnnnn” will contain your Newsgator subscriber number, and “##” will contain a number associated with the location.)

    Select “Update File” to update your WordPress file.

Display your site, and the feeds associated with the location you created in Newsgator will now show under the heading you specified above (in my case, “Science and Nature”). All of the headings and links in my blogroll were created by following this procedure.

Any time you unsubscribe from a Newsgator feed, the link will no longer appear in your blogroll. If you move a feed to another folder and want that reflected in your blogroll, you will need to clear the check box for the feed in the old location and check it in the new location (which is still less work than updating links in WordPress). Similarly, to add a new feed to your blogroll (since you deselected automatic addition of new subscriptions), follow the same procedure: access the location where you want it to appear, and click the checkbox.