Backups Backups and more Backups, always an important mantra. I was surprised to find that a fellow geek wasn’t backing up his MySQL database that runs his website. Yea he has backups for all the code files, but not for his content!
It frightened me when I found out how many people don’t backup their websites SQL databases. Every WordPress blog runs off of a SQL (normally MySQL) database, if you use a WP-Hosted blog then your safe as they back it up for you. If you host your own WP blog (or geeklog, drupal, etc, etc) then your backups are up to you!
It is for that reason that I have just finished knocking together a page detailing how my simple Linux script backups up my databases at regular intervals (some hourly, some every two, some once a day!) zips them and emails the smaller ones to me!
Check out the article on “Backing up MySQL databases automatically in Linux“.
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Picasa's Logo. It makes me wonder if Picasa are infact a hippy department of Aperture Science!
It’s taken me a while to find a WordPress plugin that does what I want it to do, but I think that I have finally found one.
I have started to play with a few of Google’s applications, after listening to the T.W.i.G (This week in Google) Podcast by Leo Laporte. One of the first PC apps (rather than web app) that I chose to test was Picasa. For those that do not know about Picasa, it is a photo editing and organising program for both the PC and Mac. The software provides some great features to allow you to organise your pictures, and also provides you with the ability to upload them to your own Picasa web album for all your friends and family to see.
The feature which really impressed me with Picasa is its facial recognition system. Shortly after it loaded all my pictures (only a few minutes for over 30GB of photos), I was informed that it had found some faces and would I like to identify them! After tagging a few people into photos (akin to Facebook), I was surprised to see an little notification asking me to validate its guesses! It had taken the pictures I had manually tagged, and found other pictures with those people in them.
Along with the upload and facial recognition features, Picasa also provides some touch up and alteration features, from the tipical Red Eye tools to a “straighten” feature which allows you to sort out those slightly wonkey pictures!
The Photos page of my site is now pulled from my Picasa web albums, by a WordPress plugin known as kPicasa. There are others out there, but I found kPicasa to be an easy to use yet fully featured plugin.
Feel free to take a look at my photos, and leave any comments if you wish!
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