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| CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |
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Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Do you back up your system? How bad would it be if you lost everything that is on your disk right now? Anyone who has worked with computers for a while will tell you that it's not a question of if your disk will fail but when. Disks are complex electromechanical devices that store data in very small, very dense units on a magnetic surface. The recording head rides on a layer of air above the disk surface that is smaller than the thickness of a human hair. It's so small that normal disks are not certified for operation above 10,000 feet, because just the difference in the air density beteen the surface and 10,000 feet is enough to make the heads hit the surface of the disk, or "crash." The only good protection against disk failure is backing up your data -- copying it to a different storage device. Popular solutions are CDs and DVDs, tapes (mostly outdated now), second hard disks, and remote storage. One source of remote storage is the Internet. Yes, you need a high-speed connection for this. There are several sites that will not only let you store your data on their disks, but they will send you software that will automatically update all the files that have changed since the last update. There are several services available on the web but two of the least expensive are Mozy and Carbonite. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviewed these two in December of 2006 and selected Mozy as the one he preferred. You can read the whole Wall Street Journal article. Mozy has a free version, limited to 2 Gbytes. For many home systems, this is more than enough. For $4.95/month, you get unlimited storage. As Mossberg points out, the first backup can take a long time. Thereafter, however, it is quick and painless. And if your system does die, you can download the stored files to a new system or get a DVD mailed to you with all your files in your file structure. 
For a long time, all we had was Mapquest. It was clunky and not very pretty but it worked, more or less. Then Google Maps came along with a much prettier face and more bells and whistles. Well, Mapquest has now come back with a few bells and whistles of its own, one of which really answers a need. How often have you asked Mapquest or Google Maps for directions someplace, looked at the route, and wished you could tell it to take another route that you know is better? Google will allow you to specify a non-highway route as an option , but that's the limit of its flexibility. Mapquest, however, lets you select the exact route you want. You start out the usual way, asking for a route. But if you want to go a different way, you tell Mapquest you want to add another point on the route and select a point that will force it to go your way. It will add the point after the end of your route, but also give you the option of changing the order of the points. Once you do that it calculates the new route. You can add as many as 10 intermediary points to force Mapquest to go exactly the way you want to go. If you are a runner or bicyclist and you want to map out a route and see the mileage, another good site is http://www.gmap-pedometer.com. You find your starting point on the map, tell it to start recording points, and then double-click all the turn points on your route. At the end, it tells you the mileage in your choice of miles or kilometers. You can also ask it for an elevation chart that tells you where the hills are and how high they are.
Last month we mentioned virtual credit cards as a way to avoid credit card fraud. There's another way that has been around for quite a while, although it's not as flexible -- PayPal. When you open an account with PayPal you give it your bank account number or credit card number so it knows where to get money when you pay a bill. When you pay with PayPal, Paypal charges your bank account or credit card but the vendor never sees either of your numbers. Instead they just pass you to PayPal, who asks you for your PayPal password and your agreement to pay the bill. Once it's paid, the money is transferred from your account to the vendor's PayPal account. The only "gotcha" is that not everyone accepts PayPal yet. The number of online sellers who do accept PayPal, however, is increasing, so if you have a PayPal account, it's a nice secure way of paying without letting your credit card number out on the web.
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