Patrick Says

A friend on Facebook was lamenting the loss of a lot of family photos when something went wrong on her computer. And she had no backups. People, I don’t know how many times you need to hear it, but you NEED to have backups of your files. Not everything. Just the irreplaceable data. If you running right now without backups, stop reading this post and go buy an external drive. It’s not like natural hair loss treatment, which I suppose can be hard to find. Everybody sells external drives and the prices have plummeted.

There is NO reason not to be backing up your stuff.
It’s easy. It’s cheap. It’s essential.

If you need help, ask in the comments. But get a backup.

Hey, so I had a tech blog called PatrickTalksTech.com.
You may notice that it is gone. Yeah, well…

I really don’t have the time for a tech blog. While I do love tech and the Internets and will continue to talk about them here, I can’t maintain two blogs and produce the quality content you deserve.

I’m still here. It’ll just be only here for awhile.

UPDATE: I’ve imported all the old posts and comments from PatrickTalksTech.com into this category here on Patrick Says. Some of the links made be dead, but the meat of the articles has been saved. That was important to me.

Karen Goodman posted an article this evening about a very cool website and one of the best Web 2.0 uses I’ve seen in awhile. It’s called Walk Score and you enter an address and it gives you a score based on the proximity of restaurants, bars, grocery stores and retail businesses near the address.

Very cool.

So, I checked my home address. I knew it was going to be bad because I live in an area fairly far-removed from the city and also, we have no actual sidewalks. Anyway, yeah, it was 14 of out of 100, which translates to ‘car-dependent’. That’s accurate.

I also checked my work address and got a very respectable 82 out of 100, translating to ‘very walkable’. But I kind of expected that as I’m across the street from a mall (albeit, a nearly dead mall).

So, what’s your Walk Score?

So, I listen to podcasts. And lately, Leo Laporte has been taking advertising from a blog hosting service called Squarespace. Having had the experience of self-hosted versus third-party hosting, I was interested to see what Squarespace had to offer. Since they offered a free 14-day trial, what did I have to lose?

Thus, I Can Has Test.

Here’s a brief overview of the good and the bad.

• Good: Ajax-y feel makes adding content a snap.
• Bad: Not as intuitive as it appears.
• Bad: Overpriced, in my opinion.
• Bad: Control. You don’t have it.

So, the good is that working with the layout and content is really very pretty. Where others program like WordPress have a back-end, Squarespace allows you to edit from the page as it appears. This is very neat. Changes are shown to you (but not to others) in real time.

However, it’s not as simple as it appears. Sometimes, the menus are not as self-explanatory as you’d think or something that should be simple takes more steps than it should. For example, I added a text widget. It took about three to four steps, plus some headscratching, to get it in there.

I think the price is a little high at $8 a month to start. It’s certainly not exorbitant, but you can do better. GoDaddy offers self-hosting plans for as low as $5 a month and WordPress.com and Blogger offer this kind of service for free.

Lastly, and most importantly (in my opinion), is control. I’ve had blogs at BlogSpot. And they’re a fine service. But ultimately, if your host goes under, you stand a chance of not having anything as backup. Also, you are ultimately at the discretion of Squarespace in terms of what kind of site you can have. Take this line from their TOS:

The final choice of whether an account is in violation of any of these policies is at the sole discretion of Squarespace, Inc.

Sure, they’ll tell you every company has these statements, but with a self-hosted provider, you can create any site you like. It’s not your providers business. That, to me, is why I would never go back to a third-party host for my website needs. I want full control and access to complete backups of everything.

You should want that too.

I had this great idea today for a WordPress plugin someone should develop. I’m not a developer, but if you know one, send them the idea and maybe someone can write it. Heck, maybe it already exists…

It could be called the ‘Hey I’m Dead’ plugin. The plugin would once a day check the date of the last published post. If the date of the post was x number of days from today, it would publish a prepared post stating that either the blogger had died or was just not posting at a certain interval. It could even provide a link to the obituary service of the bloggers choice.

Because really, if you kicked the bucket, does anyone have the credentials needed to sign in to you blog and let people know? This is important, peeps. Let’s get this developed.