URL Updates and Public Suggestions.

Tonight I stepped out of character and worked on public suggestions and URL updates.  Just to make it more interesting, I focused in the Adult section.  Hey someone has to do it. 

Just a few observations I made today:

1. Is it really so hard to get somewhat close to the right category?  I a mean come on, I had to move a Spanish Mobile Homes site out of Adult and over to Regional.  <rolls eyes>
2. Why is that 90% of the update requests I looked at today were just poor attempts to keyword stuff their descriptions?  Oh I re-wrote a few of them that needed it, but only one update request was pretty close to being ok.  I almost sent the submitter an email encouraging them to apply.
3. Adult Oriented sites are an interesting breed……

There are a ton of update requests needing processed.  I don’t know why I stumbled into the ones in Adult but that is where my edits lead me tonight, so thats where I went.  I also managed a few minutes over at Resource Zone.  Funny Spam everywhere there too.

Hey did I mention yet that I fell into the world of Twitter?  Well I did, not sure why though.  I seem to be more of a blogger than a tweeter.  I have a couple of  opinions on social networking sites.  My Space appears to be the best tool the FBI every came up with, Facebook is for those of us old guys trying to relieve some of the glory days  and Twitter seems to be a good place for what I imagine to be a lot of lonely people who love to hear themselves talk. 

Yikes, I can see the letters coming in now.  It should be noted however that I am on all three of these occasionally and as I have no followers at all, yet 11 updates in only a couple days being on Twitter I certainly fall under the category of “Must like hearing my self talk”.  The good news is I am following one of those good “Tweeters” so I feel better about having the account.

Back In The Swing Of It

Well not really but I am trying.  I spent most of this morning working through update requests in the US.  I didn’t manage a ton of edits, but I did clear a couple of states of update requests.

Having been so long away, I had to keep the my copy of the Regional Template open beside me to keep from screwing up.    Funny, I used to pride myself on knowing and following the template.  Even having contributed a large amount of time and effort in its descriptions during the Standardizing Project.  Having been away so long, I found myself second guessing where I thought sites should go.  Its not just like riding a bike, I am a bit rusty and need to constantly refresh my memory on certain categories and placements.

I hope to be able to find a bit more time now to contribute to DMOZ and BOTW (whom I apoligize sincerley for my lack of input lately).    I owe some time to each and really wish I could force myself to sit down and dedicate a large chunk of time to it.  Until I get some of the rust worked off though, I am going to have to tred slowly.   Still, it feels good to sit down and work at it again.  I look forward to grinding out some more edits and builiding some much needed categories.

Importance Of Backups

My goodness its been a while since I last had time to sit down at my keyboard and pen some thoughts.  To anyone who has wasted time in checking back, sorry. 

Things have been extremely busy the last couple of months, as my real company has been going through a small face change and relocation.  Nothing major, just expanding our horizons.  However we learned today something that DMOZ learned a while back, and it is a hard lesson to learn.

We have been down for almost a week, transitioning to our new location.  Our last business day was this past Saturday.  We fired up our server for the first time since Sunday morning and predictably it imploded.     “No big deal” says our IT guy, we just swap out our server machine with a new temporary one, restore from one of his two Saturday automatic (redundant) backups and we build out a new server to copy new transactions on too.   Smooth, quick and painless…..

Fast forward two hours later….  Well wouldn’t you know it, his two automatic, redundant backups failed on each day Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, none of which through the normal error flags alerting anyone to failed backups.  Fortunately for him, I am a paranoid freak about our data.   My last work day (real work, not boxing and moving day) was Friday and used my archaic manual backup process to save copies of all data through close of business on Thursday.

Result was tomorrow we will be able to restore everything but Friday and Saturday relatively easily.  The bad news is, we get sit down and manually re-enter $20,000 in lost sales transaction data.  It could have been much, much worse had I not been a dinosaur in my old ways and manually made backups each and every day I am working.  Three cheers for being an old fart I guess.

The lesson learned here today kids, never trust an automated backup that your IT guy says keep you covered with plenty of redundancy.  Make sure for yourself that you have good backups every chance you get.
Sorry to those who have sent messages to me that I have been missed around DMOZ and BOTW.  I am really, really sorry that I have been mostly non-existence for far two long.  I truly hope that I can get back to some normalcy in a few weeks after we get real life settled back down.

Regards.