Part Time Webmaster Blog

Ok, this story may sound familiar to you, if it does, I’m sorry. Here goes. I’m sitting on the floor in the play room with my kids. We’re playing Connect Four. My wife called out to me from the other room innocently, “Honey, have you been on my computer?” Immediately, I wondered if I had, I knew I could be in trouble. After all, as an IT professional, I tend to jump on her computer and make tweaks, updates, anything. I always feel like I’m helping out, but sometimes, I really can screw things up. Thankfully, this time, I hadn’t done anything, so I felt pretty good. So, happily, I responded with “Not at all.”

Well, my happiness was soon going to end. I hopped up and walked on in to check out her computer. As I walked up to her computer, the screen was black. I thought, this can’t be good. On the screen read the words “Drive 1 not found; Serial ATA, SATA-2 Strike f1 to continue F2.” Ugh. As with all IT people, the first reaction was to reboot. Nothing, same thing.

After a while of searching the internet, I had come to the final conclusion that her hard drive was FRIED. Great. I thought of all of my contacts, who could help me out. I knew right off that we didn’t have a backup. Me of all people, a highly trained professional with no backup.

After going to the office and asking around things didn’t get any better. I did find someone that may help. But, the usual conversation went something like this, “Yikes, I don’t think you can get it back, you may want to check around.” After more researching, I looked for data recovery services in the area. A lot are there, but prices started around $300 when you added all of the pricing in, and services could take days a week.

Well, I don’t have a great ending to this story. I came home this evening to try one more time, maybe the machine would boot up, we could back up things and proceed. I plugged in the computer and snap, a flash of light filled the air. Yep, the power blew on the computer, now it’s not doing a thing.

Well, the moral of this story is to get backup software for your Windows XP computer. The sad thing is that we had it all along. My wife loves to burn DVD’s of anything from photos to videos. And, guess what she uses, NERO. After doing some research online, guess what I found out? Nero has a backup program on it. So, we could have been backing up all along. So, we now have started using the Nero backup on all of our computers at home. And, I’d hightly recommend starting to backup your computer.

If you’re looking for a good solution, I’d recommend NERO. She loves it, and now that we know it has a backup option, I love it to.

Click on the following banner if you’re interested.



Just in case you’re wondering, here’s some more info I picked up from their site.

Simply create
Faster One-click Rip, Burn and Copy functions for CD/DVDs and Blu-ray
Create professional-looking photo slideshows or DVD home movies with integrated 3D menus.
Easy export and share to YouTube™, MySpace® and My Nero
AVCHD and other Hi-Def format support up to (1080p)
Stream Content to Xbox 360™ and PlayStation® 3
Skip the commercials automatically from your recorded TV shows.
Nero Move-it
Share Your Digital Life
Transfer your music, videos, and photos easily to enjoy online or on portable devices.
Transfer content directly from device to device, choose the device that you want to use, Nero Move It transfers the file.
Convert any file while maintaining the best quality for iPod®, iPhone™, PSP® and other portable and mobile devices.
Convert files and quickly sync to your chosen device later
Easy file sharing between compatible devices including, PCs*, digital cameras, mobile phones, and PDAs.
Transfer numerous files to multiple devices simultaneously

Ok, so it’s probably obvious why the number one search on this website is part time webmaster. I keep wondering though, why people were searching for the term. Is it because you’re looking for one? Is it because you are one? Please feel free to let me know. I’d be more than happy to add some insight in to what you’d like to know

Every once in a while I’m asked how to do some simple changes in HTML. Not all administrative areas allow you to use that nice WYSIWYG editor. So, here are the most common requests:

Text Color – red, green, white, black, etc common colors
enter text here

Line break

Hyperlink
www.bluecreekweb.com

Paragraph

Bold
enter text here

What to do if you want to unbold something?

Well there are a couple of situations.
If the text looks like this: hello joe, how are you
Then the code would look like this hello joe, how are you

OR the code can look like this:
hello joe, how are you
hello how are you

This can be for a number of reasons, but typically it’s a reference. Here are a couple of steps I typically try:

• Upload your graphic to the directory on your server.
• Try altering the url address to pull up your graphic directly. For example, this link will show google’s logo for search http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo6.png
• If you don’t see your graphic, then I’d wonder if the file is uploaded. Check to make sure
• If you’re certain the graphic is there, compare your ftp directory names. For example, some systems are case sensitive. For example, your server directory may be images, but your address link has Images. This can also cause the issue. And, this is probably the number one issue.
• If you still don’t see your graphic, double check the reference in code. It has happened where people will reference graphics on their own computer in code.

Hope that helps!

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 | Posted by admin | Categories: Generic, Hosting |

Here’s something we ran into not to long ago. For some reason, if we put in 1/1/2009, the time was different from the local time. We couldn’t figure out why. Well, it comes down to this, the times were different because of the local time, more specifically daylight savings. The international date and time doesn’t change, but here in the US the time does change to account for the season. Make sure to verify, but your times will be off by one hour in the summer. Note, this error will not show up in the winter when we are not accounting for the time change.