The Wisconsin Skier

Ufda! It has been a long off-season.

I am starting to post pieces again and it is taking some time to re-acquaint myself with the various procedures and customs I established last year. No doubt some of those customs and procedures are lost as I did not “document” any of them and have essentially been winging it. However, since the beginning of this year through April sometime I was putting up at least a post per day I had fell into some routines and patterns.

I am anxious to start falling back into them here and developing new ones!

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The Wisconsin Skier is open for business again or perhaps it is better to say, getting ready for business again.

I have some updates in mind for the site and some new features in mind. I will not say what they are until they are near completion.
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Now, we are done with the hows and have a good handle on the whys.

Now we move onto the whats (you can do with your backups). True, they can save you in case of disaster, but I use my backups for more than just disaster recovery.
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Uh-oh! Disaster strikes and your website got blasted and now you have to bring it back. No fear, you have your backup sets handy, but do you know how to restore from those backups?

It is very simple.
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Yesterday, I discussed backing up your website, more specifically, I talked about the piece on the web-host side. You may recall, the result of yesterday’s talk is two files one with all of you web-files and another one containing the SQL code to recreate the database that is — your data.

In addition, I gave you guidance on setting up your cron job to run the back up script. The piece left out though, is the part that pulls the backup files from the web-host onto your home computer. Part of the rationale of backing up is to prevent your data from loss in the event of system malfunction or malfeasance. Malfunctions may be brought on by human error or due to what are often referred to as Acts of God a fire at the host’s data center, a flood, or just plain old failure of the storage devices. Malfeasance might be a cracker (i.e. an unauthorized person who breaks into your system) who then goes and wipes out your data and files, or it could result from a plain old Oh $#!+ moment on your part, eventually you will have one of those.

Today we will talk about automating the backup file download.
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Is very important. There are a number of lightning bolts that can strike your website and force you to start over from scratch, and two of them have happened to myself.

The first bolt that hit a site of mine was it got cracked. Fortunately, not too much damage was done, the crackers (I don’t use the word hack here, as hacking can be a “white-hat” activity, but cracking is almost always “black-hat”) did not destroy my data, they just broke into the site and created their own index.html file with some gibberish about the villain of 9/11. I traced the attack to some people in Turkey who used a script to search websites with the particular combination of CMS and version I was using. They then used a known exploit to get in. All I needed to do was to remove the index.html and replace the old CMS files with the latest version. There is a lesson here, keep your CMS software up to date. Sometimes updates are for new features, but more often they are to patch security holes. Also, it is probably good practice to remove references to the CMS you use, both visible and invisible, but that is not really a trivial task as there are a number of ways a person can find out what CMS you use.

The second bolt though was more destructive. It was a web-host system failure. Some of my sites were restored by the vendor’s backup, but not all. The one site missed had to be built completely from scratch, that is the materials I had created for that site were gone.

So, how does one back up their site?
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Can be challenging even during ski season, how much more when skiing is out of season?

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If you have a blog or ever dabbled in blogging you know how blogging for bucks makes gardening in the desert seem easy. It is not that easy and ad-revenue is tough to earn. In fact, my experiences indicate the more I write the less revenue I earn from the advertising.

So, when I came across a post today, passed on by a friend it noted that blogs and writing should not be your main product, that your blog should support some sort of product or service of real value to people. I like to think my writing is a real product, but I know better I am not going to be winning any prizes for my writing.

In fact…
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About one month ago I relaxed commenting requirements, I no longer require you to sign in to comment on an article. I set this site up that way to head off spam comments, still the spam crept in via pingbacks and trackbacks. I then relaxed the sign in requirement and the comments then started rolling in! I have a cadre of loyal readers who comment now, and then of course the spam comments started to roll in:

Great post your writing is real clear and you knowledge oh so awesome.

The comments do not refer anything in the article and they leave a website, they obviously hope I click on and buy lots of V!@gr@ or 0xyc0nt!n.
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Look over to your right and vote in the new poll: How Many Times did you Ski/Board Last Season? We want to know!

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