Occasionally at work, I have to fill in for a co-worker who has the unenviable job of being on call 24/7 communicating the status of our various systems to our customers.
To help make life a bit easier when we’re on call, we’ve been given a BlackBerry to use.
One of the niftier things I’ve done at work is building what we call our System Status Dashboard that provides realtime updates on the health of our services.
I built that tool on top of the blogging platform Wordpress and it works great. Thanks to a Wordpress plugin called wPhone, you can log into Wordpress and post updates using the browser on the BlackBerry.
In fact, this entire post was written and published using that plugin just so I could see how it works before I have to use it for real next time I’m on call.
Granted, I’ve never lived anywhere else, but it’s clear to me that there is no better place on earth than Canada.
Where else do you find a country of such stark contrasts? From Newfoundland to the Maritimes, through the uniqueness of Quebec, to the cosmopolitan city of Toronto, through the Canadian Shield and Northern Ontario. On through Manitoba and into the flat, endless Prairies. Then the mountains of Alberta, the fertile valleys of B.C. and the dramatic rainforests of the West Coast. Up North is a whole other world again, and you’ve still not pass over the borders of this great nation of Canada.
And that’s just the geography. Equally diverse is our people. From native Canadians, to the immigrant populations that include my own parents and everything in between. It’s a country that is as much defined by its differences as its similarities. But the one thing that binds us as a nation, the one thing that can be said for all Canadians, is that we are Canadians and each is treated as equal compared to the rest.
While you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing on this 142nd Canada Day, be sure to think about how fortunate we all are to live in Canada.
The other day at work I was talking with my boss about the future of our corporate website. We’re starting to think about how to make it work harder for us. In other words, we want to make a transition from having a website that simply presents information, to a website that does something. In the case of ours, that something is to get someone to become one of our customers.
I jokingly said that I thought we could get rid of our site-wide, common navigation bar in the header. I was only half joking, really. I actually think that you don’t always need to have a standard navigation across all of your pages.
I rolled out a new design for this very website the other day and I specifically omitted the navigation area that I’ve generally had across the top of the page for the last few iterations. Instead, I’ve created some blocks of text in the sidebar area that talk about what is on the site and at the same time, allow you to go there to see it.
Yes, that is the navigation. But it’s not the typical kind of navigation that you normally see on blogs and websites. But how can that translate to our corporate website?
I started thinking about how we want to tell the story of our company, or explain the benefits of working with us, or point out what’s great about our services. Each of those is a pathway through our site, leading to what we hope will be a purchase decision.
Considered that way, the concept of a site-wide navigation area seems less important. Maybe it’s possible to have a home page that leads people down various different pathways to the content they need. Maybe you can interlink to allow people to switch paths at intersections?
At this point it’s all just some musing about what websites do and how they are structured.
In the meantime, I’ll just soldier on with my new navigation-less website.
So much for my Kleen theme. I got tired of the way the site looked, so I went digging around the internet for some inspiration that I could use to do a quick redesign. I found a trend towards simpler sites with no navigation and decided to head that way for a while.
The result of a few hours of work tonight is this new theme I call Krispy. There’s still a bit of work to do to refine some things, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Yes, it’s tougher to get around at times, but everything that was there before is still there now. Page navigation moved to the sidebar from the top and the structure of the blog is less magazine-like than before. You can find a listing of previous posts in the sidebar, and the archives are also there for the browsing.
I’ve blogged about how to make sure that your website is backed up in case of a disaster, but what about your home computer and all the files on it? Think about how much stuff is sitting on your computer right now that isn’t anywhere else. That could include files, photos, videos and who knows what else.
Do you have a second copy somewhere? Is that somewhere in the same place as your computer?
I’m guessing that a lot of people have no backup whatsoever. In the event of a hard drive failure, or theft, you’d be in deep trouble. Imagine if you woke up in the morning and your computer was just gone. What would you regret not backing up?
But how do you make sure that you have a copy of your files in the event of a disaster?
I use a multi-prong strategy to make sure my files are safe:
- Photos: I store the best of my photos on Flickr. Not everything is there, but the best of the bunch are safe and sound. If I lost everything, I’d still have those pics. Plus, I have DVD backups of all my photos going back a few years. Alternatives to Flickr include Picasa and even Facebook.
- Work files and documents: I use Dropbox to store a copy of all my documents and files. Dropbox is an easy to use web service that gives you 2GB for free or 50GB for about $10/month. Not much to pay for peace of mind. In the event my computer is lost or destroyed, a copy of my entire “Documents” folder is safely stored on Dropbox. Other Dropbox-like services include Mozy, JungleDisk and SugarSync.
- Music: If you have an iPod, you’re fairly safe. Your music is stored on the iPod and if you lose your iTunes computer collection, it’s not impossible to get the music off that iPod and back onto a computer.
Whatever method you chose to backup your files, remember that it does no good if you don’t regularly update the backup and also check to see if the backup is retrievable. Too many times people have thought they had a good backup only to discover after the fact that the backup was no good for some reason.
