A cartoon created by artist Randy Glasbergen.

If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

Welcome to another fantastic Friday. It’s good to see that we’re finally experiencing some more Spring-like conditions and it’s making me look ahead to what the summer can bring. In the meantime, let’s go on our weekly tour of the blogosphere to see what people are writing about.

Jennifer Blanchard has an interesting perspective on how Twitter can improve your writing skills. A lot of people say that instant messengers and text messages have deteriorated our ability to write well, but Jennifer says that Twitter can help us write more concisely and creatively.

Kathryn Vercillo is a professional freelance writer by trade (like me) and she’s worked hard to get to where she is today. However, as many of her friends lose their jobs or have their hours reduced, these friends are now turning to Kathryn to see if they can write for some extra money too. What they fail to realize is there’s nothing easy about freelance writing. There’s a difference between writing and writing well.

Yaro Starak is widely respected as a top-tier Internet marketer and now he’s ready to share his secrets with you. He has put together a post that outlines exactly how to make money online today. The process is simple. The challenge is getting to work well and work consistently.

Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar is constantly working to improve his efficiency, but he has found that most systems and techniques simply do not work. After trying so many different strategies, he has now decided on ten time management things that work for him. Quit the multitasking. You’re actually being less productive.

Darren Barefoot partook in a little investigative journalism, revealing to us exactly how much it costs to run a big tech conference. He took DrupalCon as an example, showing us that the conference took about $350,000 to run. The organizers brought in over $500,000 in revenue though, so that’s a pretty nice profit.

You keep hearing about twitter this and how you can grow your business using Facebook. You know you should do something but your confused as to how you should do it and what works best. Don’t worry your not alone. Many people are trying to make sense of social media and what it can do for your business.

Join us for a seminar at Kwantlen College as we cover this topic over 3 hours.

We will cover how to get started on twitter, gain followers and how to do sales on twitter. You will learn how to setup a Facebook page for your business and how to market your business on Facebook.

When is the event happening?
Wednesday, April 8, 2009 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Where is it happening?
Kwantlen College (Room D128) - 20901 Langley Bypass - Langley

Cost
This event is $40 to attend.

Registration
To register for this event RSVP here.

One thing about an unmanaged dedicated server is that you no longer have people making backups of your sites, like you would with shared hosting. So you’ll have to make backups of your sites and files on your server yourself. Today we’ll be talking about an easy way to go about this.

We need to make backups because hard disk drives will eventually fail (it’s like the nature of them), especially when they’re running 24/7/365 in a server environment. If your server’s hard drive crashes and you don’t have a backup of your sites, then what do you do? All the time and energy you put into your sites is now gone. This is why you need to make backups, and I’m going to show you how to make it as simple as possible.

While you could certainly download a backup of all your data to your computer every once in a while, that’s just not very convenient. Not only would that take up quite a lot of time (depending on your Internet connection), you’re also bound to forget to make a backup, which just isn’t good.

So, what’s the simplest, most automated method of making a backup of our server files? I believe that Amazon S3 is our solution. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides scalable, reliable (Amazon runs one of the largest networks in the world) and fast storage service for reasonable fees. They charge literally pennies per gigabyte. Not only is inexpensive, but its great APIs make using it for automated backups incredibly easy.

To begin setting up our automated backups, you will first have to sign up for Amazon S3 (you’ll need a credit card for this). After you have done that, SSH into your server. We will need to install some software to allow us to easily interact with Amazon S3. This software requires curl and perl, but they should already be installed on your server. Alright, start off by running these two commands:

curl timkay.com/aws/aws -o aws
perl aws --install

Now we need to create a file that will hold our S3 Access Identifiers (which can by found under Access Identifiers in your S3 account overview). Create the following file:

nano ~/.awssecret

Add your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key to this file in the following format:

ACCESS KEY ID
SECRET ACCESS KEY

Close that file and run the following command to make it more secure:

chmod -go ~/.awssecret

Amazon S3 stores files in buckets, in which you can have an unlimited number of. Without creating a bucket, you will not be able to store files (referred to as objects) in S3. Think of buckets as hard drive letters, you need them to store data. You will need to choose a unique name for your bucket. You should obviously try to make it as relevant as possible, just remember that someone may have already taken the name you want. Once you have chosen a name, run this command (replace BUCKET_NAME with the name you choose):

s3mkdir BUCKET_NAME

Now, we’re going to use a simple bash script to execute some commands to make a backup to S3. The script will first dump of your MySQL databases (and their data) to a .sql.gz file in /home. Then, it will compress your entire /home directory into a .tar.gz file (which will contain the databases). Once that has completed, the script will upload that file to Amazon S3. It will then delete the files it created on your server, and your backup will be complete.

So, create a folder called /s3backups and create a file in there called s3backup.sh:

mkdir /s3backups
cd /s3backups
nano s3backup.sh

Now, paste the following code into that file. Replace MYSQL_PASS with your root MySQL password, and BUCKET_NAME with the name of your bucket you want to upload your backups to.

#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%d-%m-%y`
echo "Starting backup process..."
mysqldump -u root --password=MYSQL_PASS --all-databases > /home/$DATE.sql
gzip /home/$DATE.sql
tar -czf /s3backups/$DATE.tar.gz /home
s3put --progress BUCKET_NAME/$DATE.tar.gz /s3backups/$DATE.tar.gz
rm -f /home/$DATE.sql.gz
rm -f /s3backups/$DATE.tar.gz
echo "Backup finished!"

After you have replaced those two things, you can exit out of that file. Now, we need to make this file executable, so run the following command:

chmod +x s3backup.sh

You can now test to see if the backup works correctly. Run the following command to run the backup:

sh s3backup.sh

The backup process may take awhile if you have a large amount of files. If it finishes without any errors, then you have just uploaded a backup to Amazon S3!

I did say this was going to be an automated backup. So, we’re going to set it on a cron. Personally, I run my backup once a week, which I think is a recent enough backup for my sites. You may want to run it more often, or maybe even less often, that’s up to you. I’m just going to show you how to run it on a weekly basis though. Run the following command to copy our bash file to our /etc/cron.weekly folder (which runs any contained scripts once a week):

cp s3backup.sh /etc/cron.weekly

There you have it, simple, automated server backups. Even though the process is entirely automated, you should keep an eye on it and check in on your S3 usage every once in a while (just to make sure you’re not costing yourself too much). That shouldn’t be an issue though, since my Amazon S3 bill for this month will be around $0.20. It’s (literally) a small price to pay for the comfort of knowing my websites are all backed-up and safe in an off-site location.

More and more tweetups are happening across Canada. To get the word out and make it easier for fellow twitters to tweetup we have launched Tweetup.ca. This site makes it easy for you to submit your tweetup. Once your tweetup is approved it will be available to both RSS subscribers and the tweetupcanada twitter followers.

It needs a how to plan a tweetup guest post on the site so those who have never planned one can easily set it up. If you wish to guest post that then submit a comment or catch me on twitter.

Any feedback or comments on the tweetup.ca site and design are welcome as well.

When you decide to purchase a business from someone else, should you exclaim to the world that the company is now under new management? There are certainly different schools of thought on this matter and it really depends on the nature of the transaction and a number of other factors that can affect the public’s perception of what the company or business has to offer.

Using the example of buying a restaurant, the single greatest determining factor would be what you want to do with the eatery. This, in turn, depends a lot on the current clientele and how profitable the restaurant currently is. For instance, if you purchased this restaurant because it happens to be the hottest spot in town and it’s a packed house every night, you probably want to maintain the status quo and reap the benefits of the established brand. People go to Restaurant XYZ because they know what to expect from it. If you go and announce that changes are happening, they may not be so inclined to come back. You bought into the brand and the pre-existing customer base that accompanies it.

By contrast, if you purchased a restaurant because it was a good price and a good location, it may be more appropriate to have a big opening gala to announce the changes to come. This is particularly true if you are buying a restaurant that has had significantly slowed business lately, because the announcement of new management can renew vigor and renew interest. It may have grown stagnant over the years, so you want people to get excited about the new possibilities of what your management can bring.

With the latter set of circumstances, you absolutely want to attract attention to yourself and the fact that the restaurant (or company) is under new management. Host a lavish grand opening and make sure the public knows about it. Random passers-by will be interested to see what all the hub-bub is about. Without this kind of attention, you can fully expect to continue to the slow level of business that preceded your purchase.