Not sure how many people noticed, but we had a catastrophe on Saturday. Our website hosting company, which also hosts our blog, had some problems with their SQL server. For those of you who don’t know, many websites and even more blogs depend upon SQL for content management. In non-technical terms, SQL is the filing cabinet where all the articles and comments from a blog are stored. Well on Saturday my hosting company had something bad happen and they lost my filing cabinet, PERMANENTLY. That’s not good.
Luckily, I had a backup of the SQL database and after an hour or so, I was able to recover everything without losing a single
post. One of the things that helped me was a great plug-in designed for WordPress [Editor’s Note: WordPress is the software that powers this blog, the JibberJobber blog, SixDegreesfromDave, and many others] called, simply enough, WordPress Database Backup. It is available from Skippy.net and I highly recommend it. Scott Merrill, the author of the plug-in has a companion plug-in call WP-Cron. Used in conjunction with the database backup plug-in, you can get database backups emailed to you on a scheduled basis. Take my word for it, if you have a WordPress powered blog, you ought to have these two plug-ins working for you all the time. If you don’t, go get them and install them, right now.
Also, because of the problem with the database we were not able to capture answers to our Job Board Improvement Survey. so if you haven’t taken the survey yet, please visit the article about why job boards are so hated and find out how to help. You can also check out what others have to say on the subject of job boards.