Site News – Not Your Average Engineer

February 2, 2013November 15, 2021

VaultPress Saves the Day Again!

A few days ago, I updated the Tarski theme that I use on my website to the latest and greatest version. My custom CSS file and header image disappeared once again. And once again, I ignored the recommended procedure of backing up the custom theme files. Luckily, I subscribe to VaultPress.

After a couple of clicks on the VaultPress dashboard, I had the files I needed and was able to restore my site to its normal design. Without VaultPress, I would have had to rebuild my custom CSS file from an outdated backup. I also would have had to dig around in old backups to find my custom header image. VaultPress not only saved me the pain of reconstructing my custom CSS but also saved me the time that I would have had to invest in doing that. Considering how important it is to have a functional, professional-looking website in today’s world, I am very happy that I subscribe to VaultPress.

As I have stated several times in the past, my blog is my memory. Everywhere I go and everything I do that is significant to me is posted here. If I were to lose my blog posts, it would be like losing family albums, my diary, and all of my important records in a devastating house fire. Even with my (at times lax) periodic backup snapshots that I keep locally, I have great peace of mind knowing that VaultPress keeps continuous snapshots being kept in a secure facility separate from my hosting and separate from my local backups. Thanks VaultPress! Keep up the good work!

September 14, 2011July 1, 2020

VaultPress Saves the Day!

Yesterday I upgraded the Tarski theme on my website to the latest version. In the process, my custom style file and header image were deleted. Today when I went to check on things, I realized that my site was broken and quickly discovered the reason. At work, I don’t have a snapshot of my site readily accessible. But I do have VaultPress.

Through a few clicks, I was able to download a snapshot of the themes directory from the day before I upgraded Tarski. A few more clicks, and those files were uploaded back to my server. My site is once again fully functional.

Thank you, VaultPress, for providing such a robust, easy to use service! Rather than having my site down for the rest of the day, I was able to fix the theme problems and get it back up and running in under five minutes. In my opinion, that is well worth the monthly subscription fee. And that’s saying something considering that I’m a poor, starving graduate student.

As I have said before, my blog is my memory. Everywhere I go and everything I do that is significant is posted here. Were I to lose it, it would be like having the family albums, my diary, and all of my records burn in a fire. Even with periodic backup snapshots kept locally, I have much better peace of mind knowing that there is a continuous backup being kept in a secure facility.

March 13, 2011March 14, 2011

Thoughts on things I want to do with this website

Lately I’ve been kicking some ideas around in my head for this site. There are several topics that I would like to post about but that remain in my head for the reason of not having a good way of organizing what I want to post. Specifically, I would like to post:

My SCUBA dive logs
The books I have read lately and all of the books that I have on my bookshelf
My record and CD collection

Ideally I would have some sort of custom form to post individual items in each of these categories. And a top-level category page for each where statistics could be compiled. For instance, the dive logs would be conducive to having statistics on average depth, max depth, total bottom time, number of times I have dived in various conditions, etc. It would also be great to have some graphs along the lines of what various web analytics tools generate.

Similarly, I would like statistics on the books I read. I also would like to be able to organize and list by author, genre, etc. And have some sort of visual display of my bookshelves. Maybe a way of locating where my books are on my physical shelves. And a way of noting what book I have loaned to who. Maybe some way to integrate with Amazon.com or similar to automatically pull ISBN and cover art data. The same applies to my physical music collection.

If anyone knows of plugins that can do such magic or a way of doing it within the current boundaries of WordPress, I’d sure like to know about it!