It’s Wednesday 24th June 2009 and it’s kkomp.com’s first birthday today. It feels like I started this blog aeons ago, (Really, it does. It feels like I’ve been blogging for a number of years; yet it seems like only yesterday I had my 40th birthday.) and also only a few days ago too. In the year since this blog started I’ve made about 430 posts in 24 categories. – That’s not to mention the pages. My initial intention of enough content creation to place this blog on the blogosphere map has to all intents and purposes come to fruition, and some.

A year ago the world was facing the fact that we were in a global recession courtesy of the greedy international banking system. From what I hear lately, the UK appears to be pulling out of it: The economic growth report for March 2009 appears to indicate that GDP and growth returned to a positive figure in the case of UK. Although one leaf doesn’t make a summer; it appears that there are definite signs of a recovery on the way for Blighty.

- But; as some prominent bloggers have asked; where exactly is, or where exactly was, this massive economic downturn? More than not it appears to have been largely created within the minds of negatively-biased individuals by a media-led frenzy. The press will do anything to sell newspapers. A few businesses disappeared, true: That can and does even happen in times of economic prosperity though. Were there people claiming that the end of the world is nigh, that the commercial system as we knew it was going into meltdown? Of course there were: ‘Probably the same doom-mongers who did the same thing in the last recession, and the one before that too. – But the car-parks are still just as full at the shopping-malls as they always were, the traffic still flowed as per usual on the highways and byways, the world continued turning.

I accept that the world financial institutions made crazy speculative investments which lost them billions: perhaps they’ll now learn that putting spotty teenagers with a constant hangover and greedy out-of-control excuses for businesspeople in charge of the world monetary system is a definite recipe for its doom.

As we hopefully begin to emerge from this major economic turbulence we find that the world is still changing in our favour: By “our” I mean those of us who are building our world online. Social networking and global communication has, and will most likely continue to, cause the storm-clouds to depart and to build bridges of co-operation and opportunity for businesses globally. The remainder of the commercial entities will be forced to follow suit. Unfortunately for those of the old-school; opportunity and inter-corporate/interpersonal connectivity will continue to elude them, and they will fade away to be replaced by those who are operating under the new electronically-connected socio-commercial framework that has arisen from technological and societal advancement and the evolution of civilisation that has ensued as a result of that progress.

As I pointed out earlier, during the last year this blog has accrued around 430 posts, mainly of late technologically-orientated material dealing with basic practical and theoretical electronics and/or computer hardware and software, punctuated here and there by a news item or two which stood out to me, along with the odd mystical/Pagan-themed post.

Like a human child; this blog started without form, just a cell of an idea, fertilised and conceived a year ago on a whim, following a suggestion from someone who was already a blogger. Having no womb to mature within, it slowly took form in the wild, evolving with the mainly indirect assistance of a number of professionals who advised and directed with regard to its construction, renovation, changes, layout, and to a limited extent its content.

My naivety during the first couple of months of managing this blog was a little more prolific than I’d imagined it would be. I remember my first move as my brainchild came into existence was to announce on the social media channels, which I’d only recently become familiar with and had managed to pick up 1 or 2 followers, that I now have a blog: here’s the URL; please come visit. Well 1 or 2 people did visit, for about as long as it took to hit their back button on their browser.

I’d heard of people making fortunes on the internet; but somehow connected it with the dot com boom of the turn of the century, and regarded it as a thing of the past. Spring 2008 turned to Summer, my web 1.0 website at kustomkomputa.co.uk didn’t appear to be attracting much if any business, and I was starting to become extremely despondent. – Then a pro-blogger by the name of David Risley suggested I start a blog using WordPress. – Well what I was doing at the time wasn’t working; so in for a penny… Why the heck not?

I had been using Word 10 as an html editor to build kustomkomputa.com: It was difficult, cumbersome, and the resultant pages were full of so much unnecessary html that they took quite some time to load even with a broadband connection. Despite this I’d become used to Microsoft Word, and I even understood most of the crap html in it.

WordPress was a totally different kettle of fish though. I downloaded it, looked at the files and their contents, and screamed inside. .php – I’d never learned any php. .css – I had even less idea about css. Html: No problem; even Microsoft Word. – Especially Microsoft Word. Php and css, though, looked like Chinese to me.

By the time I’d installed WordPress on the server my head was so drenched in sweat I thought I’d just washed my hair! – But I’d done it. – And it didn’t work. Check: Had I done everything right? Yes. I’d triple checked everything before I started, and triple checked it again after every stage while I was doing it. having triple checked everything afterwards I eventually discovered that fasthosts.co.uk Windows servers were no good for running WordPress on. I’d specifically asked them beforehand: -

“Are your Windows servers able to run WordPress?”

Answer: “I don’t know. Nobody’s ever run WordPress from our servers before.”

- When pressed: “Well I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work on a Windows server. If you install it and it doesn’t work properly then we can always put you on a Linux server instead. The transfer won’t cost anything, our Linux servers cost exactly the same price to use as our Windows servers, and it’ll only take a few minutes to swap over.”

It didn’t work on their Windows server. – As promised they transferred me to a Linux server, and I installed WordPress again. This time it worked straight off and without problem.

Advice:

1) If using fasthosts.co.uk as your host for a self-hosted WordPress blog; always choose their Linux servers as your server.

     1a) Always use a Linux server wherever possible: Linux is a much better server platform than Windows.

2) Don’t use fasthosts.co.uk, unless you want to be wound up in red tape.

I hope you like reading; There’s more: -

To start with I didn’t really bother too much about presentation as far as the pages were concerned, which was my first mistake: After a false start earlier in June 2008, where it ended up that I took the entire blog down and restarted from scratch due to some kind of major problem. – I can’t remember what exactly, I downloaded and used a pre-built theme, threw up a Welcome page – almost literally by the previous look of it, and concentrated on turning out content.

I decided to break the mould of how most blogs were operating early on, by having a Welcome page initially, which visitors not linking from a link to an article would arrive at, rather than having the entire content of my posts appearing in chronological order on that initial page. Unfortunately the element that was missing was a contents listing, other than a table of the ten latest posts in the sidebar. This was a matter that wasn’t remedied until 2009, which was another major mistake I made. I agree that it would have been more sensible to attend to the matter earlier, but as things turned out it didn’t happen that way. We live and learn.

Although I’d written a number of papers over the past few years; I didn’t then classify myself as a writer, and maybe it showed. A few of my articles at the time were articles featuring content throughout that I’d created myself, but they were mainly seemingly less than quality content. In the main I concentrated upon relaying news items that I found to be of interest more than anything else.

Quite obviously, since there were an almost infinite number of alternative and better-known sources of the news that I was relaying; people stuck with what they knew, and other than a few visits sent by Google I didn’t get much traffic at all. Also, although I’d downloaded and installed the tools for search-engine-optimisation, I hadn’t configured them properly, (- As I actually wasn’t aware that they required further configuration in the early days, and I also didn’t know how to do it anyway, had I even been aware.) which didn’t help either.

During July 2008 I’d started to introduce advertising via advertisments that I’d created myself with links back to Clickbank. This however generated very little, if any, revenue.

By September 2008 I’d started to relay the news items whilst also including my personal take on them. Although this helped, it still didn’t have that much upwards-effect on my traffic figures. Despite having trained in electronics, as well as having a number of years of experience with computers, I felt at the time still very naive and vulnerable when it came to blogging, pretty much throughout 2008. Despite this though, I noticed that this blog was nevertheless ranked 5-million and-something-th at the time.

In October 2008, I think it was, I began to properly configure my SEO plugins, such as All-in-One-SEO-Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, etc. This did begin to have a positive effect, and the number of unique visitors began to increase somewhat. I also began utilising further free tips from David Risley, which also helped.

By December 2008 the blog was attracting a more realistic audience figure, and I set my attention upon the blog’s homepage, as well as the header and footer.php files, with the intention of tidying it up and making it look more attractive. Php still worried me, as although it was quite easy to understand, I was constantly having issues with the syntax of anything I wrote. Also most of what I wrote clashed with the style.css file of my theme. Although my effort eventually improved the page considerably, the resultant page was too crowded, not designed well, and the colour scheme failed to convey the theme of the blog. Many female readers liked it; but since the blog was attracting a mainly male, older, audience, I felt that it wasn’t a sensible option to allow things to continue that way.

I worked on and designed an entirely new home (Welcome) page, in addition the the header and footer, and implemented in during January and February 2009. I also edited and redesigned the theme to be more in tune with the central subject material of the blog.

Previous to this, although the subject matter had been mainly of a technical bent, I hadn’t really had a theme for the blog as such, nor had I used the blog’s design to clearly indicate the subject matter to my readers; which probably left some readers in somewhat of a quandary as to exactly what it was that I was trying to convey herein.

Also the footer, (footer.php) at one point during 2008 had a serious php error in it which caused a number of problems. These issues were rectified when I almost totally rewrote the header using a lot of html in addition to attending to the php already present – which was enhanced, and also in addition I repaired and enhanced the footer.

In doing so I introduced a header banner, which I enhanced over a number of weeks. I’ve since moved the RSS link into the header, and provided the mailing-list-subscription link high in the sidebar, above the fold, by writing its script into the sidebar.php file. I also introduced a contents page,clearly linked to from the header as well as the Welcome page.

A lot of the inspiration for the redesign came from Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick’s “Becomeablogger” course, which I bought into earlier this year, admittedly a little late. Whilst I haven’t yet implemented all of the suggestions within the course material by any means yet, it has nevertheless helped me out no end. The Becomeablogger course will be having its second run soon, and the enrolment window will be between 29th June and 3rd July 2009. As soon as the window opens I’ll be advertising it in the header of this blog, so if you’d like to join up you’ll have the opportunity to do so via this blog.

One of the biggest issues for me over this past year has been avoiding clutter, both in the sidebar and on the Welcome page. The sidebar is an area which I’ve particularly concentrated upon in this respect, along with its appearance, as the sidebar appears along with almost every page and post. My intention has been to not let it detract the reader’s attention overly from the main article. I hope I succeeded in that.

That’s summed up some of the main points of the blog’s evolution over the time since its creation. No doubt it will continue to evolve further with time; hopefully in a positive manner.

The Future

So what will I be doing on this blog in the future? For the immediate future nothing much is scheduled to change. I’ll be writing more free content fairly regularly, plus making the odd tweak to the theme perhaps. I’ll be adding further advertising of top-quality products from other bloggers and online businesspeople, plus also I will probably be writing more reviews of a number of them.

At some point I’m hoping to be adding podcasts to the mix – Maybe followed by video too. I don’t have a schedule for doing so planned out at this point, so I can’t be any more definite than that at this present moment.

A year has passed, and the blog is still up and running. I have the feeling that the following year will contain many profitable and beneficial additions; both for you the visitor as well as for me the blogger, plus any help in the form of people that I take on in the future.

That’s about it for this post then: A year older and wiser.

Enjoy the rest of the Summer if you live in the upper Northern hemisphere. If you live in the lower Southern hemisphere you can take heart in the fact that midwinter has passed. Wherever you are, enjoy the rest of the year, and don’t forget to return regularly to kkomp.com to see what’s new. If you happen to be in space or on another planet then enjoy the break, and if you aren’t part of the Human Race from Earth and you actually live on another planet then I invite you to make contact with the us Humans. – We’re a peculiar civilisation, but most of us still have some semblance of normality left I believe.

If you’re not on the mailing list then it would be a good idea to subscribe to it and get notified by email. You might also like to subscribe to the RSS feed for notification too.

Finally I invite comments/constructive criticisms/remarks… You know the drill.

At last I do beleive this blog’s back in business!

I am fed up to the back teeth with the gross incompetence and awful standards of service from fasthosts.co.uk . Fasthosts have cost me my blog audience that it’s taken me 10 months to build up! Honestly; I’ve had less then 10 hits today so far. The last time the figure was that low was June 2008 when this blog was in its first fortnight of operation. Even I myself haven’t been able to connect to this blog more than four times after a long wait since Monday 11th May 2009.

The company penalised me at the end of March 2009 after I installed the Apture plugin. This plugin demanded more server resources than fasthosts.co.uk were prepared to let me have for the money (Just over 200kb: That’s not a lot of resources to me. On a 64-bit server, as they boast that all their servers are, it should hardly dent the resources.). Rather than advising me of the situation they instantly and punitively claimed to have transferred my main blog at kkomp.com from the shared-platform server to a backroom scripting server. I don’t think that they actually executed this move until May 11th; long after I’d rectified the matter. – It took them that long to act on their word.

Anyway; I phoned their technical help department back in March, having uninstalled the Apture plugin, and the guy there said that there was no longer a resource issue, and to leave it to him and he’d sort everything out.

There was no further problem until Monday May 11th, when kkomp.com suddenly became virtually impossible to connect properly to. I rang Fasthosts and asked what was going on? They informed me that I was still on a scripting server. (In other words they’d just put me back on a scripting server.)

So I put up with it for 3 days in the hope that they’d sort it out: They did absolutely nothing about it. They totally ignored my request and sat on their fat arses taking my money for nothing in return. They lose: I have already begun transferring kkomp.com.

Nobody but the stupid gormless British could cock up to such an extent by demanding a trail of unnecessary red tape to be in perfect order and lose a customer in doing so. Not only is it ridiculous, it’s also wasting the money that this company are taking from their customers in hunting and maintaining red tape in an unproductive fiasco.

I’m meant to be proud to be British. – In reality, though, at times I’m embarrassed to be even associated with the British!

At last it appears that this blog’s now back on a normal shared platform server after 3 days: 3 days in which my audience has all but given up trying to connect to a blog that they made all but unconnectable.That’s the upshot of all this polava. Had I been depending upon this site solely for my income then I’d be pretty poor this week thanks to fasthosts.co.uk.

In short I’m not going to allow Fasthosts to do this again. It appears that, being seemingly mainly staffed by backward British half-geeks on a power-trip because they still have a job in a recession, they fail to recognise that the world has moved on to web 2.0, and that people rely on their websites for a livelihood.

It’s like renting a shop in the middle of town and building up a clientele; only to find one day when you turn up for work that your landlord has dismantled your shop and rebuilt it on a deserted backstreet, yet is still asking the same rent from you.

To prevent this from happening again, at least as far as it happening by the mean hand of Fasthosts is concerned, I’m forced to transfer the hosting. Go-Daddy has been recommended to me in the past; and therefore Go-Daddy – who aren’t British – Shall have hosting for this blog. Hopefully there won’t be any teething troubles. I don’t forsee any. I’ve set up an account and requested the transfer yesterday. – So it should happen soon. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to do so; one which I jumped at without doing any homework; more out of necessity than anything else. Hopefully I won’t be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I’ll write more on the subject when I know more. Until then I hope Fasthosts won’t be pulling any more unsavoury surprises out of the hat.

Do you have any opinion you’d like to express? have you ever felt the wrath of halfwits in the same or similar manner? Please feel free to comment.

P.S. I did initiate transfer to go-daddy; but after careful consideration I decided to stay where I am. A move would only mean that I had to reset all the ftp configurations etc on my various setups, and that’s just a start. – ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. They have 1 more chance: I really don’t want the extra hassle right at the moment.

You may notice, at the bottom of each page and post, that there is now a reader-interactive star-rating system which you can use to personally rate any of the said pages and posts.

This can seemingly be applied to any blog by its owner. I was a little dubious about it at first as it seemed from the spiel that it would only work on a blog such as Blogger, WordPress.com as hosted by WordPress, etc. However it appears to be working on my self-hosted WordPress blog without a problem.

(I’ve only recently installed it; so I’m not yet 100% clued up on it yet.)

How does this plugin help me as a blogger?

It allows my readers to provide feedback to give me some idea of the overall quality and/or their personal opinion of the content I’m publishing. This allows me to see which posts go down best with my captive audience. Up until now I have relied on visitor statistics alone. Whilst this provides some general guidance on the popularity of any particular post; it is a combination of the subject’s search popularity and the article’s quality: Many readers of the article may be arriving from Google or another search engine not knowing what they’ll find, just looking for advice. They’ll then read my article, followed by which they’ll think to themselves:

“"That was a good article”, “That article was total crap.”, or somewhere in between. One or two may comment, most won’t: They’ll either take or ignore the advice and browse on.

Now, however, the reader; whether they specifically came to my blog to read my article because they like my articles, or they just arrived from a search engine looking for advice, can give feedback with a single click of the mouse without having to bother about writing out text as to whether and why they thought it was a good or crap article.

(*Note: To be able to use the plugin properly you need to register with outbrain and get an outbrain key, which you’ll need to enter into the settings panel of your plugin/widget to activate it and to claim your site.)

The Outbrain plugin includes a widget too; which you can adjust to suit yourself as set out in the video below: -

Outbrain Tutorial: Changing your Blog Settings from Outbrain on Vimeo.

How does this plugin help you as a reader?

As I stated above; you can give feedback with a single mouse-click, rather than typing text in the form of a comment. It’s not compulsory, obviously; but if you like or hate it you can tell me easily.

I do still encourage comments of course; but if you’d rather not bother you can just click a star to give your opinion instead. Also everyone else who reads the article can see an aggregated opinion of what other readers thought of it too. While this isn’t a guide based totally upon expert opinions, it gives an overall idea of what the internet community in general think of it.

This text is copied from Digital Musings.com:

“A few points about the Outbrain Rating Widget:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy… we adjust the widget’s design to your blog’s look& feel automatically
• It’s absolutely FREE

You can get the Ratings Widget here. And the Developer Blog is here.

And yes, Don’t forget to Rate this Article! “

- So I do encourage other bloggers to adopt this for their own purposes.

I have no commercial interest in this product; so I’ll not be affected in any way whether you use it or not. At this point in time I would think that it would be a good idea to at least give it a try all the same.

The video below informs you how to read ratings reports generated by the plugin: -

Outbrain Tutorial: Blog Reports from Outbrain on Vimeo.

That’s all for now.

(I fully expect my internet stalker; Syphilis Syndrone (“Sarah Palin”) to go through all my entries rating each one “Poor”. I also expect that he’ll use more than one ip address to multiply-underrate each article. He’s a mindless alcoholic thug with a number of hang-ups who’s never grown up: If you see a single rating for every post, and it’s “Poor”, then you’ll know that I pre-empted him correctly.)

I am still working on this and another blog right at this moment as promised. The changes will be largely unseen as regards this one. The other blog is my new second blog called Shazza-Live – which you can view now if you like. It’s still in its infancy at the moment and is extremely light on content. Even the pages and posts that exist are in most cases only half-built and need further attention. Nevertheless, if you’d like to check out the proceedings then please feel free to mosey on over using this link.

Although the blog has a dot co dot UK URL, you can also use the dot com URL as an alternative, which redirects to the former.

“OK; so what’s going down then?” You ask. “In the last post you made on this site you said that you were working hard and wouldn’t be posting anything until Monday. You’re not very consistent at sticking to your decisions are you?”

You may have a point there, to some extent. The reason I’m making this post is due to a number of circumstances. I thought it prudent at this point, although it may be a little late in the day for some, to post the following: –

Part of the work that I was intending to undertake was a manual upgrade of my WordPress installation. had I done this it would have been a first for me, as I’ve only done the initial install, – twice now, with both this blog and also Shazza-Live too, – but I’ve always relied on automatic upgrades. These have all gone smoothly for me up until recently: -

…And that is the main reason for this unscheduled post. – That, as well as the fact that I have possibly cut an hour or two out of the weekends’ schedule by avoiding manually upgrading.

WordPress 2.7 has a built-in upgrading feature; whereas in previous versions of WordPress you either had to rely on a plugin to do the auto-upgrade, or manually do it yourself. I always used the plugin option without any problems other than fear that things would screw up in the middle of the process and I’d have to take an on-the-job crash-course in rebuilding the database. Fortunately that never happened under the old WP Auto-Upgrade plugin; at least not in my case anyway.

When I upgraded to WP 2.7; almost as soon as it was released in RTM format, I noticed that it had its own built-in upgrading feature, and I wondered if the WP Auto-Upgrade plugin would interfere with that. – Despite the fact that it had handled the upgrade to 2.7 without problem. I made a mental note and put it to the back of my mind… And forgot all about it.

When it came to upgrading from 2.7 to 2.7.1; which I wanted to get done as 2.7 was rather overly buggy for an RTM release, I clicked on the “Upgrade Automatically” button: CRASH! : -

Upgrade WordPress

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip

Unpacking the core update

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction() (previously declared in /538/linux/kkomp.com/hdoc/content/plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade/lib/pclzip.lib.php:5421) in /538/linux/kkomp.com/hdoc/admin/includes/class-pclzip.php on line 5498

‘Pretty obvious really – Like RTFM (Read The F…ing Manual.). I failed to spot the obvious, however, and nothing jogged my memory either. I even showed this to an alleged php expert; who said that it was probably due to a fault in the server’s php and that I should get on to the host about it. I did; and even the advisor at Fasthosts.co.uk missed the obvious; advising me that my WordPress install had screwed up and that I’d have to manually upgrade to fix the problem.

Fortunately I’d also put out on Twitter, but not getting a decent response for 24 hours wasn’t helping. I took my attention off Twitter and began planning the manual upgrade; going through every step with a fine-toothed comb.

I was distracted by my older computer, which had been acting strangely for a while, crashing with a repeated BSOD. I put that problem right, and as I reinstalled Twhirl I looked at the replies in my Twitter account: –

My thanks to @kwbridge, who came straight up with the solution:

“Do you have the WP Auto-Upgrade plugin installed? If so, delete it and try again.” Brilliant!

I found and deleted the WP Auto Upgrade folder in Root\WP-content\Plugins directory, attempted the auto-upgrade, and everything was accomplished in a matter of seconds.

Target neutralised.

I’m rather embarrassed that I failed to spot the obvious though. Rather than “RTFM”, analyse, diagnose, rectify; it was more a case of LATFM (Look At The F…ing Manual.) and panic:

“Oh sh.t my blog’s crashed: There goes my blogging career before it even started properly.”

Panic stations. Dial 999 and ask for the technical assistance squad. Shut down all operations. ‘Houston we have a problem.’ Gather all available financial resources and put them on standby. Go to red alert status. Battle stations. Evacuate all non-essential personnel. Mayday, mayday…

In hindsight the problem was obvious: The php code had already declared and set a value for the function “pclziputilpathreduction()” when the plugin activated, hence when the built-in Auto-Upgrade function was activated and attempted to redeclare it, it was unable to do so and caused the fatal error. It’s all there in the error description FFS; but me being a php novice caused me to go into a flap.

As @kwbridge said in a reply to my reply:

“…I wonder how many people have that plugin installed and are going to run into the same problem?”

Well if any of those people happen to be you then here’s the solution in case you missed it like I did.

Kkomp.com – Taking you beyond the comfort zone and ensuring that you don’t miss out in getting your geek on. I so hope pcmech.com don’t mind me combining their motto with mine. Lol.

And now, with that out of the way, back to the grindstone. Onwards and upwards with panic asunder…

If you’re a computer-user; and you probably are if you’re reading this on a computer, then ‘chances are that you’ve stored valuable and/or important data on your hard-drive.

It’s a well-known fact that hard-drives don’t last forever: Their usual lifespan is 3 to 5 years. Some can fail early, others in rare cases can seem to go on forever until one day the inevitable happens, or the computer has a massive failure of some other component and it’s just not worth repairing due to age and/or cost.

Some other errors or breakdowns can damage or destroy the hard-drive also; such as in some cases a power-supply fault, or even something as simple as a sudden power-failure or unexpected shutdown. – Leading to data loss or corruption.

The simple fact is that, apart from a number of cases where you’re running a RAID-array, your computer only writes data to a single location. If that location becomes damaged or the data at that location becomes corrupt, you lose that data forever unless it’s backed up.

Even running a RAID-array isn’t definite protection against this happening. Neither is using an SSD, (Solid-State Device.) as even they wear out over time and are prone to data errors.

The only way that you can ensure the survival of your data to a much greater extent is to make backups. (Yes I said backupS, as in ‘more than one’ backup.)

How to back it up:

Probably the most common method of backing up data is using an external hard-drive. It’s a fairly good way to start; but it does nevertheless have drawbacks. We’ll label this method “Method 1a”.

I mentioned drawbacks; and I’ll explain: Your external hard-drive will probably be situated near or along with your system; most likely in the same room. If your computer’s hard-drive malfunctions then you have a convenient backup close at hand: That’s the positive aspect. Here’s the negative side of the coin: If you have a fire in your house which destroys your system then it’ll probably destroy your internal hard-drive too. If you get burglarized it’s unlikely that the thief will consider leaving your external hard-drive behind so that you have a backup of the data that they’ve stolen along with the equipment: Burglars tend to be rather inconsiderate people.

What you need is an offsite location for a backup. Cue “Method 2”: This method isn’t free or pay-one-time-only as the last method was. Nevertheless it’s well worth doing for the reasons already stated. – The method is online backup.

There are a number of companies, 2 of which I have experience with, that will provide online backup for your data. The 2 I recommend from experience are Carbonite and Backblaze. Personally I find the Carbonite GUI more user-friendly, in addition to the cost being easier on the pocket. Your personal experience may vary. Backup won’t be instant in either case. In fact it could be months before all your data is backed up; depending on how much of it there is. Once your initial backup is completed, however, subsequent incremental real-time backups will be much easier and far less time-consuming. The sooner you start the sooner all your data is backed up online.

OK so that’s two methods of backing up your data, and that’s a fairly infallible system if you use both methods. There is a third method, though, which I’ll label “Method 1b”: This method only applies if you run 2 computers.

Quite simply the method comprises backing up all the data on the one machine to the hard-drive of the other, in both cases. This third backup ensures that your data will almost certainly be retrievable from at least one source in the case of a disk-failure in a single machine.

You may not have a second computer though. You may have a home server or NAS box though. It would be an idea to keep a backup on that too. Quite honestly, although this might seem a bit like overkill; the more backups you have the better. You must remember to keep all your backups up-to-date though. Not doing this rather defeats the object of the exercise.

Backups For Bloggers

If you’re a blogger, we come to another dimension in backups: That being backing up your blog.

Now I’ve done a lot of searching with regard to this; but rather than detail all of my findings I’ll just say that it can be extremely tricky to back up anything other than a self-hosted WordPress blog. In the case of the latter it’s not that hard at all, and that’s what I’ll be talking about here as that’s the type of blog I own and you’re reading now.

When I talk about a “self-hosted” blog, you can take that to mean in 49 out of 50 cases that the blog owner rents space on a web-hosting company’s servers. You’ll appreciate that web-hosting companies can and do, at times, unexpectedly go out of business overnight. Also neither their servers nor their backups are infallible.

In addition to the above, the owner themselves may cause an error on the server which makes the blog un-viewable. (I’ve done this before with my bad php skills, such that they are.) In such cases I’ve retrieved the original file from the backup I made earlier and uploaded it to the server after deleting the file I messed up: Problem solved.

There are two aspects of backing up a self-hosted WordPress blog: The first of those being the content, the second being the SQL database. Here’s how I do it: -

Every time I change anything on the blog; i.e. add or edit a post, page, or file, I make a backup of the entire blog. I have three backups of this blog; those being the last backup, the one before last, and the one before that. Every time I make a new backup I delete the oldest backup and replace it with the newest.

I download the contents of the root-directory to the relevant backup folder via ftp. For the purpose of backing up the database I have a plugin installed that automatically backs-up the database to a folder in the root-directory daily. Therefore when I back up the blog I am also downloading a fairly recent backup of the database also.

This requires the act of going into that folder on the server every now and again and deleting some of the old database backups; otherwise the data would take ages to download due to a massive folder stuffed full of ancient worthless database backups.

I back up the contents of each of my computers daily, including the blog and blog database backups, to external hard-drive as well as to the other computer. In addition to this I have online backups being made in real time for the data on both computers.

Is it infallible? No; but it’s a fair bit of extra work which makes it as near as I can get to infallible. Call me paranoid; but once bitten twice shy. I’ll not be guilty of having no backup again.

Do you regularly back everything up? Even just at least ONE backup? If not I’d start soon if I were you: You’re living on borrowed time every second that your computer is working if you don’t have a backup source.

Further Reading – This and Other Blogs

From this author: -

1    2    3    4

In the post I made earlier entitled “A Geek’s Toolkit Supplement: Loaded USB Drive ” I spoke of what I described as “branding files”: Files that I add to the operating system to indicate that I am supplier, builder, and maintenance tech for a particular computer.

I can hear your brains whirring; so before you start thinking that I’m up to something naughty I’ll show you exactly what I mean. Oh yes; this only works if you have Windows XP installed, so don’t go trying it with a Linux or a OSX installation and then comment that I’ve messed up your operating system or “I can’t find those files in Ubuntu!” – “It doesn’t work with Leopard!” You’re quite right; it doesn’t – So be forewarned.

If this information has already been added to your operating system by the manufacturer then I suggest it best to just leave it anyway.

(Why are you playing about with your computer like this anyway? What do you hope to achieve? Oh well; your problem, not mine.)

The aim of the exercise is to customise Windows XP’s general tab in the System Properties dialogue box that you call up by right-clicking the My Computer icon and selecting Properties.

This customisation involves adding support contract information and a logo. It involves using only Notepad and whatever program you like to use to create a 256-colour bitmap.

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OK let’s start with the details: I won’t tell you exactly what details I put for computers that I build; so for this exercise we’ll assume that these details are regarding a computer built by the Acme Computer Corporation:

The computer is a Datamax, model 55102. Support line is 1-800-ACME…

Open Notepad and type the following text, replacing the example with your company’s details etc:

[General]

Manufacturer=Acme Computer Corporation

Model=Datamax 55102

[Support Information]

Line 1=Call 1-800-ACME for technical support

Line 2=  ">.invalid

Line 3=500 Billion Byte Drive

Line 4=Pixelgraphicsville, USA

Save this file to %windir%\Windows\System32 as Oeminfo.ini

Create a 256-colour bitmap of your company’s logo that is no more than 96X96 pixels in size. Save this file to %windir%\Windows\system32 as Oemlogo.bmp

Yes I deliberately soiled the picture: ‘Better safe than sorry.

To see the results either right-click on the My Computer icon or press the Windows and the Break key simultaneously.

And that’s how it’s done – No registry edits, no hacking into anything. This is a white box system builder’s trick; but it’s no massive secret. The files aren’t permanent anyway; if you remove them or reinstall your operating system the dialogue box reverts to default.

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Today, after a week of iPhone battery jokes and chidings aimed at a certain iPhone user I know online, whose iPhone battery died very quickly on Monday last, I thought it an idea to have a look into the topic of iPhone batteries a bit more deeply with a little research. A quick Google search revealed 16,300,000 results for iPhone batteries. Quite obviously I wasn’t intending to read them all, and as it happened the first one that I clicked on inspired me to write this blog entry:

The following was what I found at http://www.apple.com/uk/support/iphone/service/battery/ : Basically it describes Apple’s method of further ripping off the customer post purchase in the event that their battery becomes useless and fails to retain its charge. (I wonder exactly how long that will be? Has anyone actually reached this point already? If so then do please feel free to comment. – Otherwise do feel free to comment anyway.)

The page in question is officially entitled “iPhone Out-of-Warranty Battery Replacement Program Frequently Asked Questions” and begins with the question “What is the iPhone Battery Replacement Program?”

Many iPhone users will be glad to know that there is an official battery-replacement program – Until they hear the cost of it. The article says:

“If your iPhone requires service only because the battery’s ability to hold an electrical charge has diminished, Apple Technical Support will replace your battery for a service fee. Be sure to follow these instructions for optimizing life span and battery life before submitting your iPhone for battery replacement. “

The instructions in question say; in a most roundabout and lengthy manner, that the more use you give your iPhone the less time your battery will remain charged: That’s quite logical I suppose. The catch is, as with all rechargeable batteries, the more you recharge the batteries the less you’ll get out of them: Fair comment. It then goes into great detail about ways of not using your iPhone so that the battery’s charge lasts longer. (Following which it instructs you to “Use your iPhone regularly”.) I find it rather strange that Apple made a product that is to be used as little as possible; but as we’ll note later, this is a caveat for the process of charging you a fortune to replace a dead battery. “Jobsweh(1)“, the god of all things Apple, is a greedy and profitmongering god who likes to milk his people for every dime that they posses after they sell themselves into bondage with him by buying one of his products.

The article continues:

“How can I set up my iPhone for the Battery Replacement Program?”

“You can take your iPhone to your carrier. You can also contact Apple Technical Support or take your iPhone to an Apple Retail Store.”

Yippee-doo; thank you Apple for being so helpful. Now here’s the sting in the tail:

“How much does it cost to participate in the program?”

“The program cost is £ 55 (includes VAT), plus £ 7.29 shipping and handling, includes VAT. All fees are in Euros. Service may not be available if your iPhone has been damaged due to accident or abuse. Please review Apple’s Repair Terms and Conditions for further details.”

EH?! Fifty-five quid to replace a f—ing battery! That’s over $100 USD; and only “if your iPhone has [not] been damaged due to accident or abuse.” – Accident such as the case accidentally disintegrating perhaps? Abuse such as allowing the case to disintegrate in the first place?

Moving on:

“How long will service take?”

“Service through Apple Technical Support normally takes one week (five business days) from the date the unit is shipped to us. Time may vary if it is done through your carrier or an Apple Retail Store.”

Oh the geeks are gonna love that! A whole week PLUS shipping time without the iPhone: $100USD+ to be without your iPhone for 2 weeks; maybe more? Apple are the biggest con out there today – And people moan about Microsoft! – Er, reality check: Wake up!

This may be the answer you’re looking for:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XlkKQoUlOQg

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———–

1. Credit to DedRyzing ( http://twofourtech.com/ ) for naming the divinity of Steve Jobs.

BEWARNED: BT’s new Home Hub could cost you nearly twice as much as advertised as an existing BT customer; and you won’t know that you have to pay extra until after you receive the unit:-

Home Hub v2.0, released in July 2008

Last week I was looking at the BT website and I noticed that they had brought out a new model of the BT Home Hub router – a version 2.0. http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/homehub2.html It had a stylish curved polished black plastic design and 4 ethernet ports. I decided that I was going to have one, as the one I was currently using was white which clashed with the colour of the rest of my equipment, was chunky and fairly ugly in comparison, and I was using both ethernet ports out of the 2 available and would prefer an additional 2 ports for future expansion.

I rang BT and eventually managed to get the Indian at the other end of the phone to understand what I was saying and take my order. He said that I’d have to pay £44.99 for it, (About $90USD) which I thought was fair (That was half-price as an existing BT customer.): I’d had the existing BT Home Hub (V.1.1) free with the full package including VOIP phone, unlimited bandwidth, and their biggest and most expensive residential phone package. The VOIP phone uses a separate BT telephone number on the same line, and was channeled over the internet from the BT exchange; thus the cost of calls was allegedly cheaper. (As well as worse quality.)

(*Note: The recent BT Home Hubs; 2.0 and above, require a working voltage of 15 Volts. The older BT Home Hubs, before 2.0 require a working voltage of 9 Volts: Therefore if you’re replacing an old Home Hub with a new 2.0 or greater, you would probably have problems with it, if it works at all, if you don’t use the power adapter supplied with it and use the old one instead. (I don’t advise using the new adapter with an old Home Hub; although it may or may not work as a temporary measure. (Then again it might damage the old Home Hub due to over-voltage – I don’t know and I don’t intend to experiment in this area.)))

Today I received delivery of my new BT Home Hub; exactly as described in their advertising material. It was a snitch to set up; the only thing I had to do really was replace the old mains power adapter with the supplied adapter; as the new hub ran on a voltage of 15 Volts, whereas the old one ran on 9 Volts. I already had the required software installed, (I don’t use their free Norton security software as it’s ineffective resource-hogging crap. I only use the BT Desktop Help software.) and it picked up and worked a dream. I then realised that I hadn’t attached the VOIP handset’s cradle or configured it to work with my existing handset. The existing handset was white – Hmm; a new one would cost me so I decided I’d live with it until I had enough spare balance to buy a new black one.

I removed the cover from the cradle socket on the new hub and it suddenly hit me that there was no way that my old cradle was going to fit. I checked the package for a new cradle but none was supplied. I phoned BT. :

The Indian went all through the most stringent interrogation for identity verification; and then said he’d transfer me to the relevant department; who did it again. This time I was talking at last to a Brit – Yippee!.. But my happiness was short-lived:

The reply was that they don’t supply a new cradle separately; and that I’d have to buy one along with a new handset for £35.99 (About $70USD)> I said that this was a con: I already had a perfectly good handset; all I needed was a cradle which should have been supplied with the new hub: I’d like a free cradle by itself or I’d be taking the matter to the Office of Fair Trading. I’d also like BT to make it clear in their advertising that the new router would require a new cradle and handset BEFORE the customer chose to buy it; or I’d be taking that matter to Trading Standards as well.

To cut a long story short she wouldn’t budge; so rightly or wrongly I went ahead and ordered and told her that I’d be referring the matter to the relevant powers that be – Which I’m about to do.

If you’re a BT customer and you’d like a new BT Home Hub 2.0 with a usable cradle and phone included; the cost isn’t £44.99: That’s a con – You can’t use your existing handset as the cradle won’t fit. The true cost in total is £80.00 approximately. (Somewhere around $160USD.)

Another example of Bullshit Telecom’s dishonesty and unethical advertising.

They WILL be sorry: I’ll make sure of it!

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Today I had a tiny tweet-up with jaditelefae; who suggested that she’d make me a looney-hat so that the local weirdo riff-raff element could have something better to talk about other than how I was  making myself an outcast from their idea of society by striving to be a success and that I was a tight bitch because I refuse to “lend” them any money toward their drug and alcohol habits.

They’re not all like that round my way, but there are a number of that type; as is probably the case in many if not most neighbourhoods worldwide.

(Jaditelefae’s internet connection is currently down; which is why she’s not currently around online.)

On a different note; I thought the Olympics were to blame for two days of the worst visitor-figures for my blog ever. The figure plummeted from the norm down to a single-figure amount on Friday, only to my surprise to do even worse on Saturday. (Yesterday.):

Today, however, the trend has fully reversed: I have already seen the best visitor count ever when I last looked at 2PM, and with almost half the day still to go from thereon  I’m hoping for a landslide count at the end of the day.

Many thanks to all of you who’ve visited.

Today I was up at the crack of dawn since I never really went to bed last night, and I did an all-nighter optimising and improving this blog and my computer: So here’s to dawn; whose crack I was up at.

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So that’s all for now: Enjoy what’s left of the weekend and keep visiting kkomp.com: There is/are usually new post/s every day.

You may or may not be aware that I run this blog on WordPress; a ready-made php blogging suite available free from WordPress.org. http://wordpress.org/

Yesterday I opened the admin account to discover that a new version of WordPress had been released. It was emblazoned across every page (Not on the public blog but on the pages I use.): “A new version has been released – Upgrade now” or some similar linked wording. I ignored it for the time being, and went to Windows Live Writer to write up yesterday’s scoop. Having uploaded that to my blog I returned to WordPress the edit screen within WordPress to give it a final edit and proof-read prior to publication pending addition to the RSS feed. Still nagging me in my vision were the linked words “Upgrade now”.

After I’d published the scoop I decided to click the link in question: The manual upgrade instructions looked fairly straightforward and none too baffling but it was a case of getting it right first and only time: ‘Not one of my specialities. I decided to leave it for now and clicked the back button in my browser. “…Upgrade now” was the first thing I saw. Nag , nag, nag. OK it needed doing. but can I please turn the notification off until I reboot or something?

No. Upgrade NOW…NOW…It was starting to make me feel guilty for not doing so. I read a few other blogs – Words like “I upgraded my WP install today without any problems – ‘Piece of cake…”.

F..k this! I am not going to be made to feel guilty for doing my upgrade in my own time. I will not bow to pressure. I’ll do it tomorrow for definite. Close Page, make more coffee.

Today I log in. ‘First thing I see: “…Upgrade now”: Oh for f..k’s sake! Yes I’ll do it NOW – All right?! (Redhead part of me activated.) I’d heard or read somewhere that there was an auto-upgrade plugin. I know it’s NMA (Negative mental Attitude) but I knew I was going to make just the one mistake with a manual upgrade that would send the whole thing tits-up and lose everything: Murphy’s Law in action.

I Googled and found the plugin:-

http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html

Save to local machine – done – unzip- done -ftp up to the correct directory on kkomp.com – done…”This is too easy: Whatever you do don’t start panicking. Hold it together girl”… log in to account – done – activate plugin – done – run plugin (Hovers mouse over link; closes eyes…and…) – done:

Five self-explanatory steps or so later and – Yes: Target neutralised! (I sooo wish I’d captured the screens – but I was too emotional to care at that point.) Success!

My experience with the auto-update plugin was a happy and positive one. The plugin’s creator, Keith D’sousa, has put a lot of time and effort into making this plugin and fully debugging it to enable it to work flawlessly. If you use it either now or in the future please please do donate: Even $5USD is a minimum amount as a thank-you for all the effort that’s been put into it.