When things don’t go as planned it is always nice to have a Plan B. We have various plan’s A through Z for many different situations and even then those plans do not always go as planned. There are lots of variables, lots of things that can happen some are foreseeable while others are unknowns.

This post is to help you have a Plan B which we will call your Backup Plan.

Let’s start off with some of the basics and get more complicated as we go….

• cPanel has a built in complete backup tool inside of it. You can manually do a backup at any time, save it to your account and then back it up to your local drive. The backup includes all of our cPanel settings, files, databases and stats. The problem with this method is that it requires you to remember to do it.
• We have a database and file backup tool in our Customer Resource Center which you can use to automate the backup of your files an databases. This is included free to our customers. You do have to set it once and be sure to place it in your start up folder to ensure it starts up every boot up. This method is fairly easy but to enable the software it means you need to allow your local IP to the MySQL data access area in your cPanel.
• For some sites the files do not really matter as much as the databases do. You can use a simple cron to send you the database to an off site email for storage. The cron would look something like this….
  •  mysqldump –quote-names -u [DBUSER] -p[DBPASS] [DBNAME] > mail -s “MySQL Backup” [email]
• If you have a WordPress blog there is a plugin that will backup your site for you and again email it. If you do not use this plugin already install it now.
• There are scripts to do backups for you automatically through a cron. Here is one that looks promising.

I am sure a few might wonder if we do backups and why should you bother to do backups. It is possible that backups may be incomplete, corrupt or older. We do daily, weekly and monthly backups of  all your cPanel settings, files, databases and stats. Although it is rare there is a possibility that our backups can and will have issues.

This is where you should have a Plan B in place to restore your own backups which as you can see from above can be fairly painless if you set up that plan today.

When you originally installed PHP onto your server, you configured it with a certain set of modules. Since the PHP software you run on your server changes over time, it makes sense that the modules you’ll require will also change over time.

To install additional modules in PHP, you must recompile it. To do this, you must first cd into the directory where you extracted PHP to when you installed it. You then must get your current configuration by looking in config.nice. You can then add additional options to the command and run it. Then run make and make install. Restart Apache, and your modules should not be installed.

Extensions are similar to modules, except that they can be installed without recompiling PHP. Extensions can either be PECL or PEAR. Installing these extensions is rather simple. Simply run either pecl install extensionname or pear install extensionname then add extension=extensionname to your php.ini file and restart Apache.

Adding modules or extensions to your PHP installation is as simple as that.

Last week, we discussed the viability of interactive advertising to promote upcoming Hollywood movies. The general public wants to feel involved and wants to feel like they are participating in something. The passive experience oftentimes isn’t enough any more.

Following in this line of thought, the promotion team for Terminator Salvation have continued with the interactive strategy via Twitter. In addition to the TerminateYourself.com website, they have also set up a Twitter account to promote the movie. However, unlike other promotional Twitter accounts that simply blast out news and updates, this account has been designed to recruit “members of the human resistance” who will help to fight the evil cybernetic organisms of the future.

The idea is that these “members” can “communicate with each other through Twitter” as if they were actually a part of the movie’s fictional universe. The account will turn to this community of freedom fighters to decode “intercepted Skynet transmissions.” Yes, this “game” may not be quite as interactive as a real video game, but it gets the users to follow the Terminator Salvation Twitter account closely and on an ongoing basis.

Players earn points through timely assistance in decoding these messages and, with these points, rise in rank within the Resistance Army. Players must constantly be on guard against the machines, which periodically and randomly choose a number of players and penalize them a percentage of their points. A companion blog augments the information within Twitter and hosts a leader board for the game.”

In your next marketing effort, consider using existing technologies in new and interesting ways. Promotional Twitter accounts aren’t new, but Sony Pictures is doing something quite unique for the new Terminator movie.

The development of the WordPress software is done using a version control system called Subversion. Subversion allows the developers to track changes (called revisions) across time. Since WordPress is open-source, you can track its development, and even have access to that code. Subversion allows WordPress to have multiple write-access developers (usually called committers) and allow public read-only access to the development code.

This is the beginning of a multi-part mini-series on Subversion. The first part will be an introduction to Subversion, the second part will be about accessing the WordPress Subversion repositories and the final part will be about contributing code to the WordPress project.

Projects hosted on a Subversion server are in a repository. A repository contains a specific directory structure, trunk, branches and tags The trunk directory is used for the development of the very latest, bleeding-edge version. The branches directory is for the development of the current (usually stable) version series (in nested directories), while still keeping the bleeding-edge version development in trunk. The tags directory is used to store stable releases of the software. No development is done in this directory, code is simply copied over from either the trunk or a branch into a directory with the version of the release.

When a developer with write-access to the Subversion repository submits a revision to it, it’s called a commit. Subversion keeps a revision number for each repository, which increments each time something is committed to the repository.

When you are downloading the code from a repository, you are checking out the code.

The short form of Subversion is SVN. More on SVN in the coming weeks.

Last week we asked how do you wish to be updated during an outage and 50% said email. We do provide email support even during outages already. This weeks question is…

After the successful Meet’n'Tweet held last week we want to build on the momentum. This will give you a chance to get to know other twitters in the Fraser Valley, network and build on your twitter skills. There will be no speaker at the event but @thinkreferrals and @bluefur will be at the event if you have any questions.

We would like to discuss at this meeting the potential for a biweekly tweetup and locations for future Tweet’N'Eat. All users at the tvsc are welcome to attend.

When is the event happening?
Saturday, April 25, 2009 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Where is it happening?
Nan Sushi - 17617 56 Avenue - Surrey

Registration
To register for this event RSVP by leaving a comment or sending a message to @bluefur.