The Joys of Working on the Net
Posted On: 2010-02-15
Well here we are on a Monday morning once more. I sure hope that you guys had a great weekend ... I know we were having a great time until a major heart-stopping moment on Sunday.
We've been re-organising our networking in our home offices and, as the very last step, Steve unplugged an old network cable from the back of one of his two PCs and plugged in a network cable that would connect the computer to every other computer in the house.
It should have worked perfectly ... it was a simple operation ... but instead the computer locked up.
No problem we'll just reboot it ... nothing happened ... the fans started but nothing appeared on the monitors. Ok so we'll reboot it again ... again nothing happened.
Three reboots later Steve gave up trying ... oh well ... he resigned himself to having to drag it down to our office in town where we share space with a computer tech. What little work he had to do yesterday could be done on the other PC in his office ... except the file he wanted was stored on the dead machine.
No problem it's all on the backup drives and they're hooked up to other PCs ... except it wasn't there ... Steve, the guy who is totally anal about backing everything up, hadn't backed that machine up since November.
Times had been busy ... so busy he'd forgotten to do regular backups on one of his PCs.
Fortunately disaster was averted ... Steve brought the computer into the office this morning ... put it on the service desk ... our PC guy hooked it up to his monitor and it fired up first go. He rebooted it several times and it worked each time without a hitch.
There were no swollen caps ... nothing unplugged ... and no obvious reason why it would have stopped working. Steve's back in our home office now with the PC working fine and reading the network without a hitch ... and of course he's in the middle of backing everything up.
Only this time he's going to go even further. Once the backups to the storage drives are complete he's going to burn a few disks of the really important stuff just in case the storage drives should die. And I'm sure he's never going to let himself get behind with the backups again.
So how are your backups going? Are you backing up your important files every week to somewhere that's not on the same PC as the original files?
Are you actually sure that you are backing everything up or are you missing some important tools?
The PC that temporarily died on Sunday is the one that Steve uses to do all his site review and analysis work on. He's got so many tools and FireFox Add-ons that it's a wonder he can ever keep track of them. In fact I don't think he can because, since yesterday's scare he's put together a written list of them so that if anything happens and the computer dies completely he knows what he has to download.
Do you keep a list of all your Firefox Add-ons? Do you even bother to back up your browser's Favorites file?
If you're not doing regular backups and keeping track of all your Add-ons and special little tools, how will you ever recover if your computer ever dies and can't be revived?
Doing backups isn't exciting ... in fact it's downright boring and it's easily overlooked ... but if you're serious about your business then doing regular comprehensive backups is vital. And doing regular backups to CD or DVD is even more important if you want to do all you can to survive the disaster that's always a matter of 'if' and not 'when'.
Hopefully your disaster won't happen on a Sunday and totally destroy what was going to be a rather pleasant day.
Searching for speed
Now that Google has us all interested in the loading speed for our websites Steve and I seem to spend a lot of time looking at ways to make our sites ... and our client's sites ... load faster. If you have a look around the Web you'll see that a lot of other people are starting to get interested in loading speed too.
Now I don't know what other people are finding but I have to say that, at the moment, the speed figures that Google supplies in Webmaster Tools is doing nothing positive for us at all and are probably doing more to confuse us than help us see what we need to do.
Some of the graphs that we're seeing for what are basically very simple HTML sites are showing some strange peaks and troughs that seem to have no obvious explanation. If it were a problem with the server you would expect to see similar peaks and troughs appearing in all sites that are hosted on the same server but we're not seeing that at all.
It's left us wondering whether Google really has got a solid system for measuring the loading speed for websites or whether they're using something that's full of bugs. If speed is really going to be so important when it comes to ranking then they really need to explain how they measure a site's speed so that we can look at ways of improving our sites.
Google also needs to make up its mind about whether websites are for users or not. At the moment if you want to provide a good experience for users you're almost certain to end up with a low speed ranking from Google.
Ah the joys of working on the Net – your hardware could die sometime in the next five seconds and Google could just as quickly change the way it does things and destroy our business. It seems that we're bordering on delusional if we think that we're in control.