Spontaneous ∂erivation

Photography: that kat chick

I finally moved to Wordpress, which was much painful, and got some hosting at EsoSoft–the same guys who host Smart Bitches, Trashy Books of recent “justified and amusing tearing apart of Cassie Edwards” fame.

(EsoSoft are very nice folks and got me set up in less than a day. With Wordpress installed with the trimmings.)

What does this mean for you?

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This is just SO very fitting.

Backing up a blog can be a difficult business. Yet this is one of the most important issues for any blog–professional, amateur, or personal.

Taking care of this necessary business as cleanly as possible is important:

• Backups should be easy to make, otherwise you’ll be less inclined to spend the effort.
• Backups should be automated, otherwise you won’t be backing up regularly and might even forget.
• Backups should be stored somewhere other than where your blog is hosted, otherwise whatever disaster befalls your primary data will also likely happen to your backups. Self-hosting bloggers, this means you.
• Backups should be easily restorable.

For almost any blog, whether self-hosted or not, setting up your backup procedure is not part and parcel of your blogging software. (It’s worse in the case of non-self-hosted blogs.) And even for someone like me, who’s not inexperienced when it comes to getting nightly archives of a database running and kicked over to Amazon S3 automatically, creating a procedure that follows all of the above is extremely difficult and time-consuming. Gods help you if it breaks and you don’t notice, too.

With these concerns in mind, I spent quite a long time searching for blog backup solutions. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had actually decided to try to make a business of making something as difficult as backups easy:

There’s a new blogging shiny out there, called Entrecard.

Entrecard is basically a new blogging network based off the old-fashioned idea of business cards; each blog has a 125×125 “card” that they can drop off at some other target site with Entrecard. You earn credits every time you leave your business card with someone else, or someone leaves their business card with you.

If you amass enough credits, you can pay to have your card appear on someone else’s Entrecard widget on their site. The credits you pay go to them.

It’s a neat little economic system that basically generates the old-fashioned web rings in a less centralized way. When I’ve visited Entrecard sites and started clicking on all the little cards, I would see related sites (because of course that’s where people are most likely to a) drop off cards and b) accept the dropped off cards and offers of advertisement).

More information available at Problogger’s article about Entrecard.

Hopefully your Entrecard is cool-lookin’ and people won’t mind having it on their site.

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

This Entrecard business also inspired me to create logos for Spontaneous Derivation. I eventually used the symbol for a partial derivative (the thing that looks like backwards six, or a flipped nine).

And I replaced Blogger’s shortcut icon with my own:

Sort of a productive day, anyways.

Bainbridge Island: home of very tall trees that merge and mingle with what civilization exists, sometimes to fall in high winter winds over power lines and cause everyone to rethink priorities temporarily.

That’s my favorite part of winter.

Here are some pictures.
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My weekend reading is here.

(No, you can’t see the three books near the bottom. Those are for my sekrit projekt.)

They are:
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The first three months of blogging is hard.

I started this blog on October 10th, 2007. I started with a default Blogger template, with the same green Tic Tac theme that Miss Snark used.

Here is a sampling of the last three months, with running commentary.
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It’s not that I don’t want to, but because I’ve found that it’s almost always been more fruitful to wait for the dragon boat race to resolve itself.

Nobody makes it easy to move from one blog to any other, and in particular it gets worse the more experience you have. Not even Wordpress’s Blogger import is enough.

So here are the Big Three, problems I’ve run up against when considering a move to Wordpress, and that I hope Wordpress resolves at some point.

And, in the interests of being fair, I will also list the Other Big Three, problems that have made me even consider moving away from Blogger to Wordpress.

Photography: nzphotopro1

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If you ever wondered why the old site loaded so slowly, take a gander at this.

Click on the image for the half-sized picture if you dare. Google wouldn’t let me upload the full-sized one.

Yeaaaah.

Now my site–after much application of elbow grease–is much cleaner and clearer. Here are more details about the redesign process.

I’ve also been inspired to take on a small (and completely unrelated) sekrit projekt of my own.

The 1-click button is my friend.

Sshhhhh.