August 2005 Posts

Hurricane

Thoughts and prayers to everyone affected. I just realized (because he reminded me) that my man Josh lives 10 minutes from the French Quarter and news reports tell me is that the city he lives in is under “at least” 4 feet of water. Hoping for the best.

The VMAs

Yesterday I watched the Video Music Awards on MTV Overdrive. I enjoyed it, although as is the case with all award shows, there is music you don’t really like, so you don’t pay attention then.

But, I’m a big Diddy fan and I felt he did pretty well. The Juicy/Warning with the orchestra and Snoop Dogg was pretty cool. That was probably my favorite part of the show. Although, the MC Hammer/Diddy Dance and Kanye West performances were good, as well.

Design Contest

The iFroggy Network design contest has a bit under 3 days remaining. Just a reminder. Last one.

The Death Clock

According to The Death Clock, I have 2,279,276,804 seconds left to live. Honestly, that doesn’t seem like all that much. That puts me as dying on Saturday, November 20, 2077. 92 years old. 1 day short of my 93rd birthday. Blast!

Via Tanner (who I will be outliving).

Backup System: Sweet!

So far, so very good. I’ve always wanted to setup an automated system of backups but it was just one of those things that seemed to be something I’d always want to do, but wouldn’t get to. Well, I have it now. Here is what I have going on:

I have CuteFTP Home ($49.99) that is set to backup all of my MySQL databases across all of my domain names every 2 days. I don’t know how this might affect my bandwidth, so I might have to adjust it later to download the non essential stuff less often or something of that nature. But, these files are backed up onto my hard drive. Then, every single day all of my files inside of My Documents (which is where I keep everything – from documents to all of my network files to all of my databases, etc.) are backed up to my external hard drive (which is a Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA hard drive ($123.99) inside of an external hard drive enclosure from CoolGear ($97.80) that was bought specifically for backing up files and is used for nothing else.

The backups from my PC to the external hard drive are processed by VersionBackup (free). The program only backs up files that have changed since the last backup, which saves time, and saves the files for as many backups prior as I determine.

So, for $271.78, I’m all up and running smoothly. Well, except for the noise from the external hard drive, but I’m finding work arounds for that. I’m sure it could be done quite a bit cheaper (especially if you aren’t set on getting a 250 GB SATA). So, if you manage websites with MySQL databases that are ever changing and have a high speed connection (a must for downloading these big databases), I recommend that you do something like this.

Google Talk

Just downloaded it. About to go to bed. But, my name is pokeefe.

RSS Feed Strain on Forums

From SitePoint:

I had a user request that we make RSS feeds available for our forums at my largest community. I’m interested in doing this, but I’ve never done it before. I was just curious what, if any, repercussions there might be for making an RSS feed available on a large site with thousands of members and hundreds of thousands of posts? Such as strain on the database, server, etc… anything. There may be none, but not knowing… I wanted to be safe.

Any thoughts?

Backup Hard Drive in the House

So, last night I got my backup hard drive all setup. It is a 250 GB SATA Seagate Barracuda inside of an external enclosure from CoolGear. I also picked up CuteFTP, which allows you to schedule FTP downloads. So, what does this mean?

Well, hopefully, this means I’ll be able to schedule FTP downloads of my databases to my hard drive with my hard drive being backed up by my backup hard drive. And, if so, that’ll be awesome and I’m a lot better off.

Next thing I want to buy is a headset (Jeremy recommended that one). I’ll probably buy it when I buy the Kanye West stuff.

More AdSense = Less Defaults

I didn’t realize this would happen, but I should have as it’s not any big shock/unexpected. Since making AdSense my number 2 ad network behind Tribal Fusion (which only affects one site, so you basically have AdSense as my top ad network on my sites), I have dramatically cut my impressions on networks I had farther down my chain, such as BURST!, FastClick, Casale, etc. Dramatically. Very little going to them anymore. We’ll have to see how this affects my overall revenue. If I make more then what I made before, which is ultimately possible, it’ll be fine… but, it may lead to me getting kicked out of these other networks, I daresay.

Late Registration by Kanye West

Another CD I’m looking forward to is Late Registration by Kanye West. I might pre-order it. I don’t know. But, I’m definitely planning on buying it. I’ve been listening to Diamonds from Sierra Leone a lot. You can listen to it at the Roc-A-Fella Records site (labeled Diamonds). The remix with Jay-Z is also good.

I might also pick up the College Dropout DVD. Unfortunately, that puts me 0.53 short of the free shipping threshold on Amazon…