So after the fiasco earlier this month, I resolved that I'm keeping my own backups of everything. And since e-mail is what started the problems, e-mail is where I'm going to start too.
There are several good ways I could backup my e-mail. It'd be trivial to write scripts to tar up my mbox files every once in awhile and download them. Or I could rsync them to another account. However, I decided to go with a truly off-site backup, that was stored in a more usable format that I could search through immediately and restore piecewise if necessary. Aka GMail!
All I needed to do was setup a forwarder from my primary e-mail to my new backup GMail account. (I have a real GMail account for things that might spam me; this is a separate account.) Now I'm receiving mirrored copies of everything to that account. I don't need to do any spam prevention or anything, since I can search for whatever mail I need quickly and easily. And GMail has a much more lenient account dormancy policy— 9 months— than do most free mail providers.
All in all, I think it's going to be a fine solution… but let me know if I'm missing something ;)
The redesign itch is definitely hitting for my site, with summer here and all. If ZetaBoards weren't eating all my time, I'd get onto it. I have some nice ideas, though, including:
- Liquid layout (finally)
- More emphasis on the site sections that get used a lot (blog, code) and less emphasis for the others (photos, about)
- More graphic use
- Some AJAX here-and-there (now that I sat down and learned the basics)
- More "integration" with some of the things I play with on the internet (Ubuntu, Digg, ZetaBoards)
Now if I can only find the time…
So you'd never believe the events that led up to this… but I just deleted my entire website. I was able to save two things: the MySQL dbs, and ZetaBoards stuff. Pretty much everything else is toast. So it will be a bit sketchy around here while I rebuild.
:'(
I just won $25 from the PayPal "Mobile Mystery" sweepstakes. I never win anything!
Rawk.
March
7165 unique visitors that made a total of 13520 visits.
Total Bandwidth Used: 3.62 GB
April
8475 unique visitors, an increase of 18%, that made a total of 15849 visits, an increase of 17%.
Total Bandwidth Used: 2.22 GB
This represents a savings of almost 39%. This is due nearly completely to two things:
- Blocking hotlinking from my photos
- Optimizing my blog images (header + smilies)
Optimization is totally, totally worth it. Give it a try!