The start of a new year is often a great time to get oneself reorganized, set goals and do some planning.  Planning and goal setting are great things to do but it is easy to become discouraged if we don’t achieve or accomplish them.   As a result, many people (I’ve been guilty) give up setting goals (or making them very low) because they feel they won’t achieve them.

Medium to long-range goals are often derailed by a lack of short-term focus to get things done.  Life is full of distractions and competing priorities.  If you try to get everything done at the same time you’ll get nothing done.  If everything is a priority, nothing is.

Instead of giving up or setting the bar too low, I’m looking for tools and methods that will make for a better plan of attack on achieve the goals I set and the immediate tasks I need to accomplish at work, at home, at church and in my own business.  It is definitely a work-in-process and often a challenge to my sanity!  Sometimes I try something, only to find it doesn’t work or only works for a short while.   But I have found the key is not to give up, but to keep trying.

I am currently trying out a few things that I hope to share over the next few weeks.  In the mean time, I’d love to know how do you stay focused?  Do you have any methods, tools or tricks that you have found that work for you?

Email is probably the oldest “app” in the tech business that is widely used by the masses.  But that doesn’t mean you should have to settle for a bad experience. While web-based mail like Google and Yahoo have come a long way in their development, there are still a large number of folks who prefer a native desktop application to process their email.

If that is you, you might to check out Postbox 2.  It not free, but it does have a free 30-day trial.  One of the many features it offers is a unified inbox, able to bring multiple email accounts together in one place.

So what is your current email client of choice?  Are you happy with it or thinking of a change?

There are many ways to now add a better looking signature into your email including the native one found in Gmail.  If you want to take it another step, there are also plugin extensions that also give very robust and professional looking signatures.   I discovered and starting using AutoPen over a year ago.  While it took some work to set up, it gives the ability to have multiple signatures if you have more that one email account that you send mail from.  I have 3 email addresses and this gives me the flexibility of a different signature with each one.   This image is an example of one of them.  In the actual signature each social media icon has a link associated with it.

Another one that I have recently come across which looks to be easy to setup is Wisestamp.   Both of these are extensions to the Google Chrome browser, so you have to be using Chrome for either to work.  Below is a clip to show you how it works.

I would love to hear if anyone else is using either of these or another service that they have found. Let me know in the comments!

[email and RSS readers can click here to watch]

WiseStamp Demo from wisestamp on Vimeo.

In the previous post in this series on backups, I talked about a great tool for backing up a Joomla! website. Now, I’d like to highlight another awesome tool that makes backing up your WordPress site a snap. The plugin is called Automatic WordPress Backup.

It is a breeze to setup and get running and the plugin can be configured to run automatically for you and backup your site to Amazon’s S3 Web Services. If you don’t yet have an account on Amazon created, you can create one on the fly as you walk through the settings of the plugin. Once you have setup your Amazon S3 account and linked it to the plugin, you are pretty much good to go – it is dead simple.

You can set the backup schedule (I do mine daily) and then forget about it. The plugin will do the rest for you. You don’t have to worry about remembering to run your backup, it happens for you according to the schedule you set. You will have the peace of mind of knowing your backup is made and available in the event something bad ever happens to your site and you need to recover.

If you have a WordPress site, you really should have this plugin. No excuses when backups can be this easy! Check out the plugin website for more information. In this video clip, they even walk through the basic set up for you.

As promised in part 1 of this series, today I will go over a solution I have found to be effective in backing up a Joomla! website. In that previous post I talked about the headache and the heartbreak I felt when I discovered that our church website had been hacked and wiped out. I had not yet implemented a formal backup procedure for the site and that could have be disaster had the database been lost as well. It still was a lot of work to recover, which inspired me to finally figure out a plan for making regular backups of the site.

I will start off by pointing out that while I’m pretty effective with learning how to do web technology, I don’t pretend to be an ‘expert’ or know all the possibilities that are out there. I share this simply as a way of letting others who might be interested what I have found and am currently using. I may find something better and adjust later on, but for now this is what I am doing to provide that insurance coverage against another catastrophe.

My Criteria
The first test for the solution to work for me was that it had to be easy to use. I’m not a super techie in the area of network servers and if the process is going to last in my world, it must be easy to use. I am also preferential to those that are easy to install, but I am willing to put in more effort up front if the product is going to make my ability to do the job easier afterward.

The second criteria for me was that I wanted the backups to be in the cloud – preferable with Amazon’s S3 web service (Simple Storage Service). Local backups on the same web server as your site are okay, but don’t really provide the best protection. If something happens to your host that backup file could be lost as well. I also don’t like the idea of having to download backup files to my local hard drive as that can take a fair amount of time, depending on the size of the site as well as take up a lot of space.

It was this second criteria that had stalled me from implementing a procedure in the first place. Not a valid excuse, but just being honest. I should have at least made manual backups and put them somewhere until I found a better solution.

Akeeba Backup
After doing a fair amount of research, I discovered Akeeba Backup (formerly Joomla Pack). It is a Joomla! extension by a developer in Greece (I love the global nature of the web).   This solution is very robust and comes in both a free and a pro (premium) version.  I went with the professional (pay for) version because it gave me that integration with AWS that I really wanted (see above).  The process is not 100% automated but it is about as close as you can get.  There are many options available but the basic settings are such that you can start there. I only added the link to my AWS account and was able to start backups immediately.

From the component’s control panel you can simply click on the “Back Up Now” option and get started.  It gives you a nice progress dashboard that lets you monitor the status of your backup.

In the next post on this topic I will go into some options for WordPress blogs.

Backups are really a form of insurance. And like insurance, you really hope you never have to use it, but when if the situation arises, you’ll be glad you are covered.

Recently I discovered that our church website (which I maintain) was wiped out. By wiped out, I mean WIPED OUT – GONE! My heart sank when I saw the blank screen and confirmed the disappearance of all of the sites files in the directory on our web host. We had worked hard to roll out this new site about 9 months ago. There were countless hours of work that were simply lost. I suppose it was like a digital version of finding your home destroyed by a tornado.

Causes and Excuses Don’t Matter
At that point, what can you do? It is too late to prevent the destruction from happening. You can only rebuild. Rebuilding in either the real or virtual world is much easier if you have insurance. I certainly understood the need for backups and have done them before for other things, but I had not yet gotten around to implementing a backup procedure for that site. I had excuses for the delay including trying to find the perfect process which would automate everything, but the fact remained, I had not made a backup and now the site was gone. Excuses aren’t worth very much at that point.

I found myself also wanting to find out the logical question, what happened? This makes perfect sense and might help justify yourself by pointing blame at someone else but at the end of it you are still in the same position – your site is gone.

Rebuild from Scratch or Recover?
Those are really the two options you have. If you haven’t made any backups you are forced to rebuild. With backups, you have the option of being able to more quickly recover from those backups and only have to recreate changes since the last one was taken.

I was practically sick to my stomach as the impact of the devastation sank in. I cringed at the thought of having to recreate everything we had done over the past 9 months. I searched and searched and finally found something that held a glimmer of hope. While our site files had all be lost, the SQL database which was used by our CMS (Joomla! in our case), was still there.

Moving Forward
This meant I still had much of the content that was created with our Joomla! system including various articles, web pages and basic content that is part of the site. What I didn’t have was the system to present that information and the controls and images to make it make it look good. No mistake, I still had much work to do including reinstall of Joomla!, gathering and uploading of media files (pictures, podcasts, etc) but not nearly as much as I would have if we had lost the database as well.

How About You?
Have you ever suffered loss when a computer or website crashed on you?  Did you have any backups?

In the next post in this series, I’ll talk about some tools and procedures you can use to help prevent this kind of catastrophe.