not a pleasant anniversary

Six years since the World Trade Center attacks.

What has our country learned? What have we done in response to them? How have our policies in the Middle East changed?

Why the hell did we elect this fascist warmongering idiot and his cronies in the first place? And why did we elect him again? Assuming either election was actually anything like fairly counted.

remote backups

So I just skimmed through this lengthy thread on a webmaster BBS: a huge percentage of the sites hosted by a little reseller have vanished because said reseller didn't pay the bill to the larger hosting provider he was using; this has possibly happened because the person behind this one-man operation died. (Slashdot summary, with link to long thread, here.)

This, coupled with a bit of paranoia due to waiting for my own website to reconnect to the world (rdwarf.net is changing providers, and it seems to be taking a while for the DNS servers to reconnect properly - oh, and it's back up, at least for me. yay! the dns is propagating.) led me to a guide to using rsync to keep a local copy of your remotely-hosted website.

The basic recipe given here works quite fine; I just finished running a backup. The comments have a few good suggestions as well - I've tweaked it a little to be this:

rsync -azPe ssh username@your.host:/full/path/to/your/directory/ /Users/egypt/Documents/web-backup --exclude=php-cache*

Adding the 'P' into the flags gives me a progress meter; the '--exclude' bit tells it to not bother with the assload of generated HTML my back end keeps around.

I may end up automating this, but right now, just clicking the saved command file to refresh the backup when I upload a new picture will help a lot. My site's not database-driven so I don't need to back that up as well.

I've been meaning to do this for years.

( footnote )

comics economics

Caveat: None of this is based on personal experience.

I've been doing a lot of lurking around webcomics discussion forae, trending towards the places where creators discuss the field. One thing I'm pondering is the financial aspect of it. Nick and I are doing Absinthe for its own sake, but I'd be lying if I said I don't have any hopes of making a few bucks off of Absinthe now and then, once it's on its way.

( Read more... )