Oct
2
2 More Simple Home Backup Solutions
Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life | Leave a Comment
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With the financial crisis swirling around this week, I took another look at ways I keep my data safe. To best achieve this, offsite backups are a must. Should my computers become damaged or stolen, my data is still secure.
I’ve written before about Mozy, an effective automated online backup system, but recently I’ve discovered a couple of other ways to ensure my data is safe. These solutions are simple file-copy based, but work well for most applications.
Online Backup Redux
SyncBack (Freeware) is a simple yet effective backup utility. To quote from the helpfile:
SyncBack Freeware is used to back-up, restore, and synchronize files and directories, whether they be on a local drive, a network drive, an FTP server, a ZIP archive, or on removable media.
And it does exactly that. Through my web-host, I have an FTP account that I’m using to regularly backup my extensive digital photo collection.
SyncBack simply logs into my FTP account, looks for changes in the file or directory structure, and then synchronizes the offsite structure with the local one. Zip compression is an option.
As a freeware utility, it works well, though the full (paid) versions offer more utility including data encryption, CD/DVD backup and many more. View the handy comparision chart for more details.
Simple Hard Drive Backup — really simple!
My next door neighbour (a bit of a hardware geek) introduced me to the Thermaltake BlacX USB Hard Drive docking station. That’s a mouthful, but it describes the item.
Basically, you plug this little device into any free USB 2.0 slot on your PC. Insert a SATA Hard Drive (up to 1 TeraByte) into the dock. A quick initialize and format later, you have a fresh, empty HD on your system.
Setup time: under 2 minutes.
With the cost of drives continuing to drop, this kind of personal complete backup becomes more and more affordable. My setup cost under $100, CAD.
Your Windows or Mac system will recognize the adapter and drive as a removable storage device. Which means you can now use your favourite backup software (SyncBack works for this) to save your data. Or, simply copy your files and folders to the new drive.
When you’re done, eject the Hard Drive, and store in a safe place off-site. If you want to get fancy, you could automate your backups to the BlacX drive, and cycle between two (or more) drives, keeping the most recent backup at work.
The one downside to any backup solution is the time to backup. Using SyncBack you can schedule your backups to run evenings or whenever you’re not using the computer. Also, to make your backup have less impact on your work, you could stagger your backup: Photos day one, Documents day two, Save games day three..etc.
So, between Mozy, FTP and offsite HD storage, there are many good solutions for the paranoid user to consider.
Sep
30
Telemarketing gains another enemy — the Canadian government
Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life | Leave a Comment
Previously I’d written about iOptOut, a free service, set up by Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist.
Well today citizens of Canada are now able to register on another Do Not Call list, this one run by the government. Marketers should realize that telemarketing is so 20th century.
But, even with this double-double assault on telemarketers, this new solution isn’t perfect.
The problem is, Canadian law allows many exemptions to the Do Not Call regulations, including political parties, survey companies, newspapers and registered charities.
As well, if you have a previous business relationship with an organization, yep, they can market to you over the phone.
Now, here’s where iOptOut differs from the federal opt-out service.
Under the law, exempted organizations are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of the number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.
iOptOut is a service that ’specifically requests’ that your number be removed from telemarketing lists. It fills the holes in the legislation by maintaining a list of organizations (some of which you have dealt with in the past, banks, airlines, etc) and once you set up your profile, contacts them on your behalf and asks for your number to be removed. Simple and effective. And, when coupled with the federal list, maybe even doubly so.
Sep
14
Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy
Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life, Review, Web | 4 Comments
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Google Chrome is no Firefox (yet).
For the last week and a bit, off and on, I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based systems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very efficient, and stable. Pretty good performance for a ‘beta’.
I do have concerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘monitor’ my surfing activity (by using Google Gears functionality), but then again, I use Gmail and other Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.
But, without plugin extensibility, Chrome is currently a curiosity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.
One major annoyance is the lack of Adblock. The web is a very marketing-heavy place, and I prefer to selectively view my advertising. The Adblock extension for Firefox allows this.
To achieve an advertising-reduced surfing experience with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a local privacy managing Proxy server. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.
A solution to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/
1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings
4.) A windows box pops up, choose LAN settings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it.Tada. Enjoy.
Geekzone provided the process (thanks guys!)
Aug
8
I love mashing technology! (freebies)
Filed Under How to, In the life, Social Media, Web | Leave a Comment
I’ve written before about Moo (cards & stickers) and LinkedIn (the business social network), but this is the first time I’ve written about both in the same post.
Short story.
Moo is letting you make 50 of their beautiful photo-enhanced business cards for free!
It’s really mashup2
Moo itself is a mashup of the traditional business card printing business, an online card creation and billing model, and an ability to import images from Flickr and other sources. The new mashup component is that you can import parts of your LinkedIn profile into the card creation process.
And 50 free Moo cards is always cool.
Technorati Tags: mashup, social media, business, printing, cards, moo, LinkedIn, cool, technology
Jul
22
Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?
Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, In the life, News, Web | Leave a Comment
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One little secret that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has likely been involved with is the Internet-wide patching of the Multi-vendor DNS Issue.
Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to websites that they control, intercepting important and private information (such as passwords, banking info, etc).
Frequent Black Hat Speaker Dan Kaminsky today announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server - clients, too. Kaminsky also announced that he had been working for months with a large number of major vendors to create and coordinate today’s release of a patch to deal with the vulnerability.
News of this industry-wide vulnerability and the collaboration (to fix the flaw) was originally scheduled to be announced at the Black Hat Security Conference in August, but due to the vulnerability being published elsewhere, the presenter thought it best to release the information so that people can take the appropriate actions.
What can you do?
Basically, this is a complex issue, but it boils down to a simple test and a very simple fix.
The test:
To find out if you are vulnerable to this issue, you can use the DNS checker link on Kaminsky’s webpage here (in the upper right corner).
The fix:
If you are vulnurable, then you can either A) wait until your ISP fixes their DNS servers, or B) set your own computer’s DNS strings to point to OpenDNS servers.
I highly recommend option B.
The OpenDNS website has friendly, easy to implement instructions on converting your DNS settings and also offer a whole host of additional features your current ISP may not have:
Features
I’ve written about OpenDNS before, so feel free to check out these previous articles and then help save the Internet.
And if you do test your ISP using Dan’s web page, please post your results in the comment section! I’ll start things off by adding mine.
Technorati Tags: Black Hat, DNS, OpenDNS, Security, Flaw, Vulnurability, Privacy
Jul
18
Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge
Filed Under Blogging, Doing, How to, Web | 4 Comments
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A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regarding merging two corporate domains. Two organizations, with similar or complimentary lines of business are now one. What to do about the left-over websites. A quandary.
Below I’ve outlined 6 areas to consider, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I guess the only reasonable quick-answer is to first understand the business goal for the merged business. Once you understand that, you can begin to ask questions about the goals for the new website.
Let me create a fictional example to help illustrate the situation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll outline a couple of things to think about for each of these points.
Obviously there are many more things to consider, but this is a blog post and not a downloadable eBook
Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:
Ben’s Bikes (a local mountain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a market leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new mountain bikes. They also have exclusive dealership agreements with a number of the premier mountain bike manufacturers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select clientele and are considered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional mountain biking aficionados.
Sammy’s cycle shop is a general bicycle retailer. They don’t really specialize, but they do have a wide selection of mid-priced bikes in all categories (road, mountain, touring, cruising, kids, etc). They also have multiple locations in the local geographic region.
The businesses have merged and are operating as Ben & Sammy’s cycle therapy. They have a small internal team tasked to manage the website integration.
Now that we understand the landscape, we go back to the quandary of the website. Let’s get to some important questions:
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Audience
These are the visitors to your site; your potential or past customers. Questions you should be asking your team include:
- Who are you servicing and what are their goals for using your website? This is basic and should be asked before any website is designed (or redesigned).
- What’s the business purpose? Is your website there to book appointments, to take orders, or to provide a catalogue of information? Your new site will depend on how well you answer that questions, and how well your audience understands that purpose.
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Content
This is what your audience is looking for. Audiences conduct research and order online.
- Inventory — both sites likely have similar content, so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make content decisions until you’ve evaluated all the content assets.
- What about content unique to one business…is it still relevant in the new business landscape?
- Keep only content that supports the audience’s ability to fulfill the business goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.
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Google Juice
Both sites have some search engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of search keywords or search term. It determines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a particular phrase or keywords are searched upon.
- Determine if pagerank is really important to your business needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
- 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new domain, you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the search engines know that the previous businesses haven’t vanished, just merged. Setting them up can be a bit technical but is very important to ensure that visitors who’ve bookmarked the old business pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.
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Ancillary touchpoints
Over the development of the two previous websites, you’ll find that there may be some communication touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular email newsletters. You’re going to have to consider migrating
all these to the new site.
- Now’s a good time to evaluate the integration of your entire communication process. Where does web fit? How about RSS feeds of particular content streams…or newsletters? This is where your marketing team will have some valuable input too…really!
- If you’ve had a website, you’ve likely been measuring traffic to that site. Well, since you’re merging sites, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your website measurement strategy. Will you continue using the free utilities or consider purchasing a service contract with a service provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?
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Changing external linking
Both websites have been around for a while, and have a fair number of inbound links from other sites and online articles.
- These help build pagerank (Google Juice). Yes, they’ll automagically flow through when they hit the 301 redirects, but it’s also good to contact the sites directly and ask them to update their links. This is a great time to (re)establish communication with your website network…work the social side of the medium
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Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old websites will still be bookmarked or linked in old email etc. If, perchance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.
- Keep your old sites live for a year or two. Domain names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old content on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to maintain) and leave helpful messages on the appropriate landing pages. Use your analytics and server logs to determine heavily visited pages.
I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I mentioned, this is not a book, just a blog post. So, there are many more things to consder in the merge process. I’ve listed a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.
Jul
2
LinkedIn explained for the common folk!
Filed Under Doing, How to, In the life, Social Media | 3 Comments
Every time someone asks me to explain why I use and promote LinkedIn, it seems I have a good 15 or 20 minute conversation coming. Then they invariably want to check out my profile and see who I’m LinkedIn to.
Now I’ll just point them to this excellent CommonCraft video. Simple, easy to understand, and entertaining. And they can easily get their own LinkedIn account.
Technorati Tags: linkedin, social media, video, common craft, network, networking, communication, social, peer
Jun
23
Tweaking your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin to support Wordpress 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)
Filed Under Blogging, How to, Social Media | 4 Comments
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Sorry for the uber tech in this post, but I thought this was a simple fix that anyone running a Wordpress 2.5+ blog could do if they wanted to enable ‘Tag Feeds’.
Before I get into the how, let’s explore the why briefly.
Some background:
- Feedburner is the service I (and many many other) bloggers use to improve RSS Feed performance and measure readership of our RSS feeds.
- The FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin is a component for Wordpress (the blogging platform I use here) that simplifies the administration and implementation of Feedburner.
The current incarnation of the FeedSmith / FeedBurner plugin doesn’t support the new Wordpress feature of RSS Tag Feeds. No big deal if you don’t care about allowing your visitors to subscribe to your content based on Tag. But you’re missing an opportunity to allow your readers to better filter the content if that’s the case.
For example, lets say a visitor is only interested in receiving my posts on photography. They don’t care about all this technology, web content, usability, or search engine optimization that I may be writing about. They only care about my photography posts. Wordpress 2.5+ allows you to subscribe to any Tag Feed or Category Feed. But not if you’re using an unmodified FeedSmith plugin. Fear not, I’ve got a fix for you in a moment.
The way the current FeedSmith plugin works is that it takes all my feed subscription requests (comment, category, tag, etc) and returns only the main blog RSS feed, which is the main feed at Feedburner. Not good if you want to have an RSS Feed of only my photography tagged posts.
The workaround is quite simple and requires slightly modifying your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin. Here’s how:
- Navigate to the main Plugins page. Scroll down until you find the Feedburner / FeedSmith plugin. Click on the Disable link in the right-hand column. When the page refreshes, scroll back down and click on the Edit link.
- The Plugin Editor screen will open. Scroll down in the edit window until you find the function
function ol_feed_redirect()
- In that section you’ll be adding text to a line of code. Change the text that reads
is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() &&to read
is_feed() && $feed != 'comments-rss2' && !is_single() && !is_tag() && - Scroll to the bottom of the page and press the Update File button.
- Then, go back to the main Plugins page, and re-enable the FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin by clicking on the Enable link.
Congratulations, you’ve just re-enabled Tag RSS Feeds for your Wordpress 2.5+ blog whilst maintaining Feedburner compatibility for the main feed.
Bonus for the advanced student: Since your Tag RSS Feeds are now separated from the main blog feed, you can set up discreet Feedburner feeds for select tags. Unfortunately the little hack above won’t automagically redirect RSS Subscriptions to Feedburner for you, as the FeedSmith Plugin does. You’ll have to manually publish the Feed URL, thusly:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogbradgriercomWordpress">My Wordpress tag feed hosted on Feedburner</a>
Which would render thusly:
My Wordpress tag feed hosted on Feedburner.











