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!