For those people spending a lot of time behind a laptop or desktop PC, some safe backup storage becomes very important. Until a few few weeks ago, I created every night an incremental backup for my files and stored this data on a USB connected hard-disk. While the HD was shock-proof (FreeCom), my motherboard was much weaker. It seems that the motherboard died during the daily backup was processed. Why? Because my hard-disk wasn’t accessible the next day. My backup seems to be worthless and I was very happy that a replacement of the motherboard was the rescue for my data.

Everyone will understand my next step: I started my search for a better backup solution!

Are online backup services the best solution?

Since my laptop has the Ubuntu operating system, I gave Ubuntu One a try. They offer 2GB of free backup space and since Ubuntu version 9.10 you need only to register an online account. That sounds easy right? Just put your backup data into the Ubuntu One directory and wait until the demon has uploaded all files. They offer great features too; synchronization between multiple PCs, sharing files with trusted contacts and there is  a web browser interface. They offer also a paid plan; 50GB storage for $10/month. Not so much actually, but maybe to much for a beta service. In my case Ubuntu One wasn’t the best solution for me. Uploading files took a lot of time and the demon/client needs a restart frequently.

Important: You need to trust your backup service provider!

There are more professional online backup services

There are many companies offering these services and they offering different packages for different needs. Since the synchronization features are very nice (think about how easy you can restore your data to a new computer) I searched  for services offering this features. A second requirement were multi-platform capabilities. The last one is very important because you never know where you need to work with your data. Maybe you need to switch from Linux to Windows or Mac. We tried the following 3 services, all of them offer 2GB of free backup space. So if you like, you can try them all for free.

Mozy – Home Edition

They offer unlimited space for a low monthly price: $4.95 (discounts for yearly payments are also available). Sounds great? It is, for Windows and Mac user. They backup after the first full backup only changed/new files and it’s easy to restore your data if you need that. A Mozy backup is a great “mirror” for your data, but doesn’t offer synchronization features for multiple computers. Mozy is a great solution if you have a lot of data (for example photos) and you need “only” a secure backup solution.

Dropbox

I’m sure most of you already know Dropbox, they offer all you need: online back, synchronization and file sharing. First 2GB of space are free and 50GB of backup space are only $9.99 a month. Check these features:

• File Sync
  • Sync files of any size or type.
  • Sync Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
  • Automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected.
  • Efficient sync – only the pieces of a file that changed (not the whole file) are synced.
• File Sharing
  • Shared folders allow several people to collaborate on a set of files.
  • A “Public” folder that lets you link directly to files in your Dropbox.
  • Control who is able to access shared folders.
  • Automatically create shareable online photo galleries from folders of photos in your Dropbox.
• Online Backup
  • Automatic backup of your files.
  • Undelete files and folders.
  • Restore previous versions of your files.
  • 30 days of undo history, with unlimited undo available as a paid option.

Dropbox is a great backup service for Windows, Linux and Mac users with a lot of features. They have also a great referral system, if you refer friends you get free backup space for your (free) account. Special is also that you’re able to share single files with other people, even if they are not a Dropbox user.

SpiderOak

The features for SpiderOak are almost the same compared to Dropbox, but their paid plan is much cheaper, only $10 / month for 100GB of backup space (discounts for yearly payments are also available). The service looks more safe, Encrypted (FAST) data transport and fully encrypted data storage. The company looks more professional to me, but this is only my personal opinion as an open source fanatic. They don’t offer single file sharing, but they offer file sharing functions for directories. There is one killer feature which Dropbox doesn’t have: Using Spideroak you’re able to backup/sync every directory from you hard-disk, while Dropbox has only one directory which is used for the backups.Similar Posts:

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There are so many possibilities why a website went off-line, all of them have one in common: Your visitors can’t access your site and maybe they will never come back!

Possible problems why a website might be off-line:

• Web server or network is down – A very common problem, there is so much computer technology used…
• Some web service has stopped working – It might be just one of them; MySQL, Apache or Named/Bind and your website doesn’t function for 100%
• Too much traffic on your site – Most web servers doesn’t have the capacity for a high traffic website. 500 visitors at the same time might be enough to make your site slow or that a web server crashes.
• External serving problems; a name server or DNS server is down – this one is nasty; if your DNS zone is down, it’s possible that you see the problem a day later, while others see that your site is down since a while.
• A script stopped working properly – If a script is written and tested everything looks fine, but what if you get some external content via RSS or by user input? Sometimes a simple, but not standard, text character can break your website.
• At last but not least “the hacker” – there are so many people on the web trying to bring a website down.

Even if you try to do anything to protect your website or application against all the trouble above, you’re not safe for a failure. You have to monitor your website and hopefully a problem is notified fast enough before you loose a lot of visitors.

Some of you will say:

“I don’t need to pay for a service, because my hosting provider is doing this for free!”

That’s right many good providers will monitor the server you’re hosting on and/or they provide tools which will monitor your server or website. If you use them, check if these tests are done by a server outside from the network where your website or server is hosted. If there is a problem in the rack or router where the monitoring server and your website is located, you will never get a message about the down-time.

Some other important feature for international websites, is the ability to do test from different locations around the world. A problem might exist for only people from some continent, if your business has to take care about this, you should know about problems happen far away from your websites location.

Website monitoring is not a protection against failures but the following features will help you to “tackle” problems very fast:

• Monitor from different locations – if one fails the bot has to use the next one
• Multiple notification options – SMS/text messages and email are required, if you can send a downtime message to more than one person, do this!
• Tests for specific content – Just a ping or HTTP header is often not enough, test for specific text on your site
• Adjustable values for a timeout – Some websites need more time than others to get loaded.

(Screenshot response times Site24x7)

If your website and server is working fine, the number of downtime messages should be very low. If you need to spend several dollars a month for SMS/text messages, it might be usefull to spend this money for better hosting. Website monitoring is to get warned if something went wrong.

Website Monitoring Service Provider

In this article we review three website monitoring service provider, all of them offer a great service product and you find them in a lower price segment. That will say, these services are acceptable for most of the websites on the Internet.

I used Site24x7 since they started offering services a few years ago. They offer anything you need to monitor your server or website; Tests on websites or server ports (you can monitor every server port) are only a view options. Visit their website for all the features they offer. They offer a free account and  15day trials for their paid services, if you use the standard or premium service you pay for each single test period  and location. If you need multiple test locations, you should use the premium plan because this plan includes 6 free locations for each test. If you need more than one website tested from multiple locations, than is this provider more expansive than others.

Hyperspin is monitoring provider who offers a lot of features and also a great reseller program. If you’re looking for a way to monetize your websites traffic, by offering your own monitoring service, you should try them. All test features are available and they have multiple locations and you can setup four of them as a global setting for all your tests. They don’t charge you for using all the locations. They offer discounts if you buy more or if you pay in upfront for a whole year. I stopped using them because their control panel was several times not accessible from my laptop (using different IP addresses).

Pingdom is the current servuice I’m using to monitor all my websites. Their control panel and website looks very modern and they offering a great plan with five tests for only $9.95/month. They offer e-mail, SMS/text message notifications and a some great integration with Twitter. Multiple test locations are included without any additional charge. I like the fast and clear interface and off course the price. I’m sure I will keep using them the next years.

While most of the features for these three website monitoring service providers are the same, is the pricing very different. I’m sure all three working great, just try them.Similar Posts:

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If you try to monetize your blog with Google Adsense you might have noticed that this is not an easy job. Blog reader are very focused on reading the content and writing comments. Many readers will not visit your site since they read your blogs in a RSS reader. That will say that we need a very flexible Adsense plugin to place our ads on the right place in our blogs articles. Some of you will say “I place them always on place A, B and C”, but I’m sure that this will not work all the time.

We need a plugin that has the following features:

• Single blog post placements
• Unlimited number of ad layouts
• Easy to integrate with each blog post using tags
• NO revenue share with the plugin author!

Additionally we like to see features like:

• IP-based filter functions
• Alternative ads for the IP filter
• Using ad code from other networks than Google Adsense

For this review we selected the 5 WordPress plugins because they have recent updates (active projects) and many features:

Adsense Daemon

This plugin supports three different Adsense layouts. All configured ads are placed on all your blog pages (single view). For each layout you have the control (7 options) where each ad will show up. The plugin has basic features and acts very static. A good plugin if you don’t need so much functions.

AdSense Integrator

If you need a more flexible plugin, you should check this Adsense plugin for WordPress. It has all the features we mentioned above and more: Default settings for automatic placement, full control about which pages have to show the automatic placed ads and a CSS margin for some better ad placement. Revenue share is enabled by default, but you can change this setting (if you don’t like to support the developer with 4% of all your ad impressions).

Everything seems working, except the single ad placement
With every placement the “initial” ad is placed too, maybe a recent bug? I posted this to the WordPress forum and will post the result here. Anyway a good plugin if this bug is fixed.

All in One Adsense and YPN!

Great plugin idea on how to configure your blog using Google Adsense or  YPN (Yahoo Network). While the configuration options are very comfortable is this plugin less flexible. All settings are site-wide and valid for all ad formats.

The plugin offers an option to use multiple ad formats, a random function will show them all. I don’t think that this really works (maybe for different colors?). There is an option to disable ads for single pages, but this will disable all ads on that single page. While this plugin looks really good, I will not use it.

Easy AdSense

If you check the WordPress plugin page you should think that this is a great plugin, but I deactivated the plugin very quickly. At the moment that the plugin was activated, it shows already the Adsense ads from the plugin author and also at least one link to his website on each of your blog pages. I need to mention that I choose the plugin because according the author, is this version more advanced and doesn’t include a revenue share. The plugin has a lot of functions to configure the different products like Adsense for search and feeds and of course the content and link units. I’m sure you can treat the setting that way to get a static ad setup for your site, but I don’t like a plugin that includes code in my site without permission and that’s the reason why my advice is to NOT using this plugin. You never know what a future version will do with your website!

Quick Adsense

Finally a plugin that has all important features and works for 100%! Using this plugin you have all the options you need for your blog site: Static placements for your whole website, custom placements for your posts using simple snippets or just disable ads for a single post. This plugin has more features:

• Add your Adsense code to your blog posts and your sidebar widgets, all settings are controlled through a single settings page.
• You don’t need to remember the tag names, just place them using quick tags in the HTML mode of your editor.
• There is space for 10 different ad layouts for the blog pages and 3 in your sidebar.
• There are no strings attached will say no revenue share or unwanted links, the only thing the author asks is to place a link or button.

There is one feature missing; the IP filter with the option to show alternative ads. Since this feature is very special and should work together with a GEO location script, I think I can miss this feature for now.

At the end I must say I go for the Quick Adsense plugin, because I need a plugin that makes it possible to place the ads on locations I choose while writing a blog post. The Adsense Integrator is also a good plugin, but because of the bug in the current version it’s not useful for my website.Similar Posts:

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Posterous is a great hosted Blog system that we talked about in this blog about social media services. The current version has already a lot of features like custom themes and functions for services like Twitter and Facebook.

The best of all their service is still free!

I noticed the last weeks that Google doesn’t index all my Posterous pages and that while I point my blog Prime Blogger to a .com domain name. My first idea was a missing Google Sitemap. I tried before to add my Posterous site to my Google Webmaster Tools account, but this requires a custom meta tag on your homepage or you need to upload a unique file to your site to proof the ownership. I suggested a function for a Google Sitemap to Brett from Posterous  and he gave me the hint that I’m able to change the HTML using a custom theme and yes this is key to get your site accepted in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Just add your site to your account and choose the meta tag to proof the sites ownership:

Next surf to your Posterous site and in the control panel choose your blog -> Settings -> Theme and customize my site -> Advanced.

Paste the meta tag code into the code box at the top. Save the settings and confirm to copy your custom theme settings.

Now it’s possible to confirm the website ownership within the Google Webmaster Tools. Next we like to add a sitemap, click Site Configuration -> Sitemaps -> Submit a sitemap

Posterous doesn’t offer a Google sitemap format but you can use the XML feed instead. This gives you not a complete sitemap but at least you can submit the latest 20 blogs to Google. I hope it helps…Similar Posts:

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If you are looking for the best software and hardware platform on the market for reading e-books and other digital media, then you will want to take a look at Amazon Kindle. More and more people are turning to it each day because of everything that it has to offer. There are three different hardware devices which support this platform. These devices are Kindle, Kindle 2, and Kindle DX. Kindle devices make use of electronic paper called E Ink for their displays. A person is able to download the content directly over Amazon Whispernet by using the Sprint EVDO network. This allows a person to get what they want hassle free.

Another great feature of Amazon Kindle is you don’t need a computer to gain Internet access. All kindle books are delivered via the fast 3G network. There are no contracts and no fees; except the purchase price for your favorite books. Amazon Kindle has all of the features that users have been waiting for. This is one reason why the original Amazon Kindle sold out in just a little over five hours and was not back in stock until five months later. This product has an impressive number of fans that will praise its features loyally.

Plenty of storage for your Kindle books

When a person takes their first glance at the Amazon Kindle, they may not be impressed right away. It isn’t the best looking product and it appears to have far too many buttons making it look confusing and awkward. However, most people that have a chance to use it become an instant fan. It makes up for its clustered looks with everything else that it offers. It has a 2 GB hard drive which allows the user to store as many as 1500 e-books. This is just the thing for anyone that wants to carry a library of books with them and make sure that they have access to those books whenever they want. A lot of Amazon Kindle users also appreciate that they can read their books without fighting pages or carrying around a large and bulky book.

Amazon Kindle has a full keyboard which makes it easy for you to annotating books or to search for something. It also has an impressive speed, a person won’t have to wait for the Amazon Kindle, it gets to those pages in a hurry. Many people find the Amazon Kindle much easier to read than a traditional book. It’s easier to hold in just about any situation. Whether someone is trying to rock a fussy baby, or trying to read outside on a windy day, this is one way of reading without fighting all of those pages. They won’t have to worry about losing their spot in a book ever again. Read before you buy, get the first chapters for free before you decide to buy a book. Not reason enough to read books via the Kindle? Many Kindle books are priced 50% lower than the printed edition.

One device for International usage

Amazon Kindle comes with its own dictionary, this is one feature that many users really appreciate. The dictionary feature is very easy to use. All the user has to do is highlight the words that they want to look up and the definitions of those words will appear right on the screen. It even keeps track and lets the user know how much of the book they have read. Another nice thing is that the battery uses minimal power until you turn the pages. This helps the battery to last for a long time before it needs to be charged. The International coverage allows users to enjoy 3G wireless coverage in more than 100 countries.

Many people are turning to the Amazon Kindle as a much more convenient way of reading their books. With the use of this convenient item, they can read anytime and anywhere. It’s also just as easy to get more books. All someone has to do is go to the Amazon store right from the Amazon Kindle and add the books that they want within mere seconds. It also handles such things as music, web browsing, and video. Many people make it a point of never leaving their home without having their Amazon Kindle on them. They find that they don’t feel like themselves if they leave it behind.

Amazon Kindle is ideal for anyone. College students, professionals, homemakers, or any avid reader is sure to love this product. The cost is another impressive aspect, it can be purchased for as little as just a couple hundred dollars. When a person considers how easy it can make their life when it comes to reading and getting the books they want, it’s easy to see why that is an impressive price.

Kindle books for web developer

There are kindle books for every genre, even for people like us “Web developer”. There are currently more than 15,000 books in the category “Computers & Internet”. I have selected a few interesting book titles for your shopping list. Psst! If you buy the Kindle before Christmas, your love ones will have plenty of books they can buy for you. This maybe the first year that you will have a longer wish-list.
Edit: Since all kindle books are delivered online via the G3 network, you can put them under your Christmas tree, but there are a few kindle accessories.

• Coders at Work (Kindle Edition)
• CSS: The Missing Manual (Kindle Edition)
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Kindle Edition)
• Twitter For The Tweeple – there are a few things that you should be aware of… (Kindle Edition)
• Social Media Success! (Kindle Edition)

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The guys at ZeroIX have done it again.

The ZeroIX Flash template is one of the most unique and impressive premium flash templates around. This aesthetically jarring, yet startlingly realistic site, instantly transports you into a matrix-like world of futuristic horror and intrigue.

The attention to detail is unparalleled, and the design can only be described as beautiful, in a gloomy futuristic kind of way. The effects used are cinematic in quality, and the seamless transitions, animation and backgrounds all help to create the feeling that you’re entering in to a new world, not just another boring old website. The ZeroIX Flash template has a life of its own, with its very own reality… it’s like a living thing that moves, and reacts differently to each and every user.

The Adobe Flash animation artists have managed to capture the scary realism with visually appealing design, and high quality sounds effects, which all work together to create the sites unique ambience.

The interactivity of this flash template is astonishing, and integrates 3D graphics, with video and audio, giving the visitor interactive multimedia experience. The opening game is not only fun, but it’ll give the site visitors a reason to come back time and time again.

Flash templates are becoming more and more in demand, and the ZeroIX template is great example of why these sites are getting more popular by the day. Site visitors don’t want to more see boring pages on-line, as they are bombarded with stale blog pages day in, day out. Instead, site owners are now have to make their sites stand out from the crowd with unique flash designs.

With years of combined experience, the ZeroIX team knows exactly what you and your visitors are looking for. The template is fully customisable and flexible enough to use with any site. They layout is totally user friendly, and easy to navigate your way around. The page is the perfect starting point for your site, and more and more can be added to suit your individual site needs. No matter how your site grows, or develops, this template will always be able to fit your needs.

The bad news is that this template is not for sale (anymore)!

Instead we have selected some other cool and dynamic Flash templates:

Use this COUPON “9Gt078urDOcXMGt0oGdd” while buying one of our flash templates and safe 5% on your template purchase. This offer is not limited to number of purchases and is valid the for next 10 days!Similar Posts:

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