Chris Cree

Whatever I find interesting

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Forced Learning: Sitemaps and Backups

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I’m working on setting up another blog because I want to explore a specific topic in detail that I don’t think fits here in my general personal blog (where I look at what I call practical life philosophy.)

I just started putting things in place yesterday, and there is quite a bit involved with getting things the way I want them to be. Fortunately I’ve learned a ton from messing around here at CREEations.

That experience is helping the process go much quicker with the new blog than it did when I was transitioning from my old Blogger format to this one here.

One of the things I wanted to get done as quickly as possible with my new blog was get a sitemap submitted to Google so the Googlebots know where to find the new site. It takes those creepy little critters a while to get around to crawling through a new site. So it should be no problem submitting my new blog before I really have completely things up and ready.

Besides, if I wait until it is ready to go, it will only take that much longer to get the dang thing indexed.

Head ScratchThere is a groovy little dealie I can use to create a sitemap for my blog with just a click of a mouse. (Google Sitemap Generator WordPress Plugin) I even have it set to do its thing automatically here so I don’t have to think about it. The trouble is it didn’t want to work with my new blog for some reason.

I kept getting some error about the program not having permission to do what it was supposed to do. Apparently me yelling (very softly – Gorgeous was still sleeping) that yes it did have my permission because I was the one who clicked the mouse and I own the site wasn’t the authority it was looking for. I mean it was never a problem here at CREEations!

Stubborn program.

If there was anyway I was going to get what I wanted done I was going to have to do some digging to find out what goofy thing it was asking for.

And I did eventually figure out the problem after about an hour of (quiet) frustration.

Heel ClickBut here’s the best part. In the process of figuring out how to fix my “permission” problem with my sitemap I also figured out why I haven’t been able to back up CREEations here. I didn’t get an error message when I’d try to back up. I would just get an empty file as a backup output with no explanation.

Now being fairly anal and a big fan of redundancy and backups, I was not at all happy about that state of affairs. My backup system has relied heavily on prayer.

Well I’ll keep praying. And now I’ve got some temporal redundancy in place, which can’t hurt.

What’s the lesson here?

Sometime we don’t come up with solutions problems that are in front of us until we are forced to. And sometimes answering one question causes other dominoes to fall in place for us.

Pretty cool the way things work, isn’t it?

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Interesting Coincidence

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I find it very curious that Blogger has been running painfully slowly the day after the Official Google Blog has a post urging folks to lobby Congress to Support Net Neutrality.

Is this an untimely coincidence, or shades of things to come? Are the big phone and cable companies putting the squeeze on Google for speaking up on the “wrong” side of the issue?

Here is what the Blogger Status Blog says, “For many users, Blogger will have been extremely slow or down for most of the morning. We continue to work on fixes for this problem and hope to have it resolved as quickly as possible.”

Of course I’m also told by some who are more exprienced than I am that Blogger is notorious for having outages, so maybe I’m just being cynical.

But I’ve never had a big problem with them in the 6+ moths I’ve been with the service. And I’m not one to complain about a free service that has as much to offer and is as easy for a beginner to use as Blogger has been for me! As far as my (limited perhaps) experience goes, Blogger is a great platform that I’d recommend for anyone starting out. It is an exceptional low cost way to try blogging out and see if it is a good fit.

Just the same, perhaps it is now officially time to move CREEations to a more reliable and robust (and yes, more expensive) host.

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Time to Get Preachy About the Internet

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OK guys. It’s time for me to get a little preachy. If you are in the US, and most of you stopping here at this point are, you need to know there is something big happening in Congress in the next week.

It will affect everyone. Globally.

Do you support any non-profit charities? How would you like it if their information could no longer be accessed?

Congress will be voting on the issue that has been labeled “Net Neutrality”. The outcome of this vote will have lasting repercussions that affect your access to information on the internet and ultimately how everyone in the world can access information flowing from the US.

Congress may decide to keep things the way they have been for years by passing a new law. Or they may vote to give the giant phone and cable companies complete control of the internet so they can convert it to their own private network.

If Congress gives control to these corporate giants, these companies say they will choose what information their customers can and cannot access.

And it is already happening.

For example Craigslist is being blocked by Cox Interactive.

What can you do?

First – Get Informed.

You can read my previous posts on the issue here and here.

Go to the advocacy sites It’s Our Net and Save The Internet.

Read what Google says about the issue in today’s entry at the Official Google Blog.

Liz over at Successful-Blog has a whole page of links devoted to Net Neutrality. She’s been tracking this issue for a long time.

And you can read what Mark has to say at R-Web Designs. He was targeted with a comment spam attack because of his advocacy.

Then – Contact Congress.

Make your voice heard. Send an email. Make a phone call. If you don’t speak up now then you are allowing Congress to be swayed by the multi-million dollar marketing campaign that the corporate giants are using to tell their side of the story.

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