Blog backup reminder

Very shortly after I started to use this blog as a placeholder for knowledge, I wondered how I could back the blog up.

I didnt get any backup going, so I am happy to get a reminder from a march post on Taosecurity:

Therefore, for the last several months I've been archiving my blogs using BlogBackupOnline.com. I used the free service while in beta, but my storage requirements for this blog exceed their 5 MB "Freemium" limits. Therefore, I ponied up the money for a "Professional" account with 250 MB storage, and the "advertising" provided by this post should help me double that amount to 500 MB.

One of the comments on the post is interesting, I have to try that:

.. also check out http://blogbackupr.com, 100MB free space

Now I am thinking if I can find an open source backup application or script that does RSS backup similar to those services? Then I could cron a backup myself.

Google analytics

Yesterday I mentioned a wish for statistics on this blog, and I came to think of Google Analytics (GA). I have never used GA before, but when I was involved in website hosting I came across Urchin, because I was testing the Urchin FreeBSD port. Later Urchin was acquired by Google and is now GA. Urchin was superior to any other website statistics software i played with back then, so I look forward to seeing GA in action!

Activating GA was very easy, I used my existing Google account and pasted the javascript code into my blog template, just above the body-end html tag. That was it! And you can add more site watches, and administer them all from one GA account!

According to a few google searches, and a user comment on a blog belong to guy involved in developing GA, it does not seem possible to add GA to flickr sites! Like that user I find this annoying, and it could drive me for a switch to Picasa, which most like will get GA functionality before flickr!

Blog backup and statistics?

After writing my first blog post I accidently deleted parts of it! What happened was this:

I edited the blogpost, saved and published it, so far so good.

Just after saving it, i got an idea for a minor change, so I went back using the browser, to the editor windows, this was a mistake! I did not notice the text was the old text before i changed it in the first place. So when i published what i thought was a minor change, in fact the first major change was gone!

So after retyped the first major change to my posting, it came to my mind: how do i perform a backup of my blog here at blogger.com?

Also I would like to know if someone actually visits, maybe there is some stats similar to that of AWStats?

Starting a blog, handling knowledge management

Welcome to my blog, thanks for visiting!

I have started this blog to improve my knowledge management system! In short this blog will contain all information i feel like saving! For more details of the entire system, see later.

The need for an improvement to my knowledge mangement came up this month, when I got a new job! At my new job I can no longer commit/checkout my personal Subversion or CVS repositories. And I dont have access to Firefox, so I am also missing my bookmark sync-and-sort plugin!

Things you wont find here are real personal information or notes that are confidential, which will have to stay on my PC or in a special Subversion repository for that.

So to summarise my knowledge management system as of today, it consist of the following:

• Ideas/readme/snip commits used to be saved in Subversion, but probably this will go into this blog from now on!
• Personal scripts will still go into personal Subversion repositories, as it is easier to deploy to servers. Snippets from those will go to the blog when appropriate.
• Howtos/working notes probably will stay in the appropriate CVS/Subversion repositories for a while. This is not optimal for sharing with more than a few people, so snippets will be in this blog!
• Pictures go to appropriate flickr accounts: personal or family, available to anyone, family or friends.
• Videos unfortunately can not be put into flickr. A place like flickr, with video power like youtube would be nice! Any ideas.
• E-mail will probably move more and more into gmail, as that will hopefully be availble anywhere i ever need it.
• The few websites i help o webmaster, are saved in a Subversion.
• Instant messaging logs are not central or searchable, this would be nice to see.
• I dont contribute to any particular Wiki anywhere, neither do I have one of my own.
• I dont contribute to a particular forum, neither do I have one of my own.
• I have not yet started using VoIP or mobile technology beyond low-tech personal use.
• Daily top urls to visit (bookmark management) will stay in Sync-and-sort for now, but should not grow into a mess like recently. Instead i will post on this blog, including my thoughts of a particular url. I have a few ideas for better bookmark management so i dont have to use sync-and-sort.
• Book reviews and notes will move from Subversion to this blog.

Search capabilities within all systems is of great importance, and if I was to share knowledge i tend to say good search possibility is the most important requirement of a knowledge system! Otherwise you will risk the system never gets used.

For my own setup above, a generic search across all systems is not available to me, I have to search each of the knowledge system parts in what ever I can. This is one of the reasons i prefer any format that is text based, because then at least i can grep for one word. I would really like to have a single point of entry search engine which can crawl any of the above! Limiting access to see and perform searches within certain data would be paramount! I am not aware of a product that can do this. For the enterprise at work we will take a look the Google search appliance, but for my personal usage i hope to find something similar that is available in some open source project?

The IBM quickr approach is appealing to me, at least from a coorperate knowledge sharing point of view. It seems perfect for Notes environments, but unfortunately i have not had a chance to try it out yet! I wish there was an open source alternative with similar functionality i could play with. A google search got me to Sun portal server but it 1) it might not be what i want and 2) has some pretty hard technical requirements for me to get started, so i will probably never know about the first issue.

I dont know how other technical people cope with the difficulties of handling job and personal knowledge management systems? Undoubtedly it must raise problems with regards to people loosing their notes if they change job or job position, and it goes without saying that you can not mirror work knowledge mangement systems off for your personal usage! As work and personal life keeps merging, this issue will keep popping up.