• 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB memory
• 160GB hard drive
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I have it for about 7 days + and I can’t say only that I am very enthusiast about it. I am very glad and grateful that finally I was able to make the switch that I was dreaming about for quite some years now. So all the thanks go to my business partner :)

I also bought a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter for one of my 22 inch widescreens. My Logitech Wave Cordless kit runs smoothly on the new Mac, just as advertised. Performance ? Sky high. Crashes ? Only a Firefox one so far (2 instances, 6+ tabs per instance).

I’ve managed to migrate all of the Windows apps I’ve been using onto my Mac. Great alternatives or even built-in functions took over.

So I’m very happy to say that this will be my only developer machine. Stable, nice and clean, fast and BSOD-free. I like the Apple way of getting things done so I’ll probably buy some more stuff from them in the future. Perhaps the iPad ? Who knows ? :)

Other cool gadgets are my new companions but I don’t intend to write about them right now. Lunch is waiting for me and then work. Just wanted to notify you guys about me finally switching to a Mac.

OK, so here’s a little sneak peek of my new desk (left out other gadgets to keep focus):

Stripped desk

[Update April 20, 2010] Here’s the new apple keyboard with it’s logitech companion: http://flic.kr/p/7LnTrk

Also, the new look of Opera 10 is appealing and the interface is very clean and yet user-friendly. One of the reasons I wasn’t able to use Opera on day-by-day browsing was because I wasn’t just browsing. I was digging through the web with Firebug and some other Firefox extensions for developers and not only. Opera didn’t had that. However, Opera’s Dragonfly improvement is here to kick some ass. Didn’t had too much time to test it around and do a decent comparison between it and Firebug however it is good thing that the competition hasn’t soften.

I think you agree when I say that we are seeing slow but steady progress on Opera’s behalf as far as competition with Firefox. I think now they need to push those Opera Widgets in the next gear and encourage people to develop new ones and create communities around them. Anyway, I think that they are moving a little bit slower on this one because they don’t want to mess up the core of what they have now.

So, for example here is a list of extensions that I am using on Firefox and widgets I’m using on Opera:

For instance, I was just searching the addons portal for “firebug” and noticed that there were actually extensions developed for Firebug itself. How cool is that ? Extensions for extensions. Now that’s just great if you ask me.

I found a delicious bookmarks widget for Opera, however it wasn’t installable on Opera 10. No screenshots maker on Opera as well.

Opera kicks in with some features like the built-in torrent client, Opera Turbo (helps you when you have a slow Internet connection) and the well-known Speed Dial. I will try to stay on Opera for as long as I can to test some more.

What do you think about Opera’s progress so far ? Is it a competitive browser ? Do you know of some more cool widgets for Opera ? Don’t hesitate to tell in the comments.

As far as the new theme, I honestly tell you that I got bored of the theme that I designed and for the moment I don’t have enough time to spend developing a new one. Besides, as you all might have noticed till now, I tend to have an affinity for developing not for designing. I am also planning to import all my posts from my other blog (SoftRelated.com) by translating them into English. Cheers !

Of course that after a while I disabled the plugin without knowing what actually happened in my database. I don’t remember if the plugin had some kind of option to do a less “aggressive” logging or not but the truth is that wp_statpress table generated by the plugin had about 5 Mb (which is definitely not good). Nevertheless the blog was OK; the plugin had been disabled, everything was back to normal; or at least that’s what I thought. A couple of days ago I had to move my hosting to another company. Did a full MySQL backup and one for the home folder. It is important to know that the database backup was created using PhpMyAdmin tool (Export, Save as file, nothing fancy). The whole SQL file was about 7 Mb in size. OK so I had a problem as the maximum limit of an uploaded file on the new host was something like this: “(Max: 102 kKiB)” (yes, I know… what kind of hosting is that ? but it’s better than nothing and no, that’s not a typo, that’s the way it shows up in PhpMyAdmin.

So there was no way I could upload the file that way. I decided to start my Wamp server and to upload the SQL file in a temporary database. After a while PhpMyAdmin timed out. I opened up Navicat and saw that 23 tables were processed. Guess which was the last one ? Yep, it was wp_statpress. I browsed the table and saw exactly 1000 entities. Lots and lots of statistical information. I decided to take a look inside the SQL backup file. I searched for the name of the table and guess what ? There were more than 15.000 lines to be processed. Each line was an actual entity which contained all the imaginable and unimaginable information regarding the visitors of my blog. I don’t remember if the plugin had or not (at least the version I used back then) some kind of option that would have let you clean the logged information from the database whenever you want or from time to time. I didn’t use the plugin more than 2 or 3 days and my blog didn’t receive great amounts of visitors. Imagine what would happen on a large scale blog. Seeing this I sat and thought… “gosh, when I will write a public plugin for WordPress it will have some tables in the database I will make sure to have an option saying something like: “Are you sure you want to wipe out all the settings and data stored so far by this plugin plugin as answers: “No, I’m sure I will be using this again.” and “Yes, get me clean !” just to make sure the user will always have a clean database”. It would be nice to have this implemented in the actual core of WordPress.

Anyway I started by deleting all that was related to wp_statpress first place). Everything went smoothly. I then adjusted the wp-config.php file but something was still not working. The database connection was being established but I was getting this warning:

Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in path\wp-includes\widgets.php on line 686

Only then I remembered that because I was in a rush when I created the database backup I forgot to disable all my plugins and widgets (you might want to check this page out before upgrading WordPress). I couldn’t get into the admin interface, my blog wasn’t showing up so I googled for that error and found a cure. I added the following lines in my theme’s functions.php file:

delete_option('widget_text');
delete_option('widget_rss');

Then I cleared my browser’s cache, refreshed the pages a couple of times and everything was back online again. Then I removed the above lines from my file. I was home free :)

I also had some problems with the user permissions on the MySQL databases on the new server so the “Data Transfer” Wizard from Navicat helped here as well.

I hope this story will be of use to someone one day.

I like to offer you all tips regarding different monetization opportunities because I know how hard it is to find some truly working systems that are playing fair. I would like to introduce you SocialSpark. It is a relatively new system about which some of you may have already heard. So what is this so called SocialSpark all about ? Well, at first it may seem like just another pay-per-post company. Fortunately it is way more than that.

SocialSpark offers you two monetization opportunities: sponsored post and blog sponsorship. What is truly original about it is that it acts just like a social site. Under its wings bloggers and advertisers create an interesting community. Everyone has an ordinary social profile. Depending on what’s your purpose you can choose to have an advertiser or a blogger profile, or even both. For example I have a blogger profile from where I can browse different opportunities launched by advertisers. As I’ve mentioned earlier those opportunities consist in sponsored posts or sponsorships.

A sponsored post is basically a post with which you create buzz about the advertisers product. What I like about SocialSpark is that it keeps in mind that these are blogs that we are talking about and it doesn’t try to create so many restrictions like other systems so that you find yourself writing something without giving the post a personal touch; because in the end, that’s all that blogs are about.

The other opportunity is the blog sponsorship. For an advertiser that wants to specify different aspects regarding the interaction between him and the blogger this can be a method to serve a controlled engagement. For example a sponsorship involves an always-on-top collapsible bar that’s placed at the bottom of your browser window. Depending on your visitors computer performance and settings when they will click the click to show/click to close buttons the ad container will show up smoothly or it will be a pain; especially because it’s huge. For the moment I’m not opting for sponsorships but I’m pretty sure things will change in the near future if they will optimize that code a little bit.

As I was saying, every blogger has a profile to which his blog(s) are attached. After placing the tracking code in your blogs footer, information regarding your blog will be available. You can choose to make it public or private. For example SocialSpark has some great built-in features that can help you have a peek at just a simple traffic overview report of a particular blog or even in-depth reports on analytical data. As an advertiser you can choose the most suitable blog for your launched opportunity based on statistics that provide you relevant information regarding traffic sources, genre and age of the visitors and others. Or instead of browsing through all those reports you can take advantage of the filter-like widget located in the right sidebar on the index page. You can use it to view the blogs that have the highest monthly visitors, most props or highest monthly pageviews.

Another great thing I like about SocialSpark is that it offers bloggers the chance of reserving opportunities and take them when they are available. Unfortunately when a reserved opportunity is available to the blogger he has only 12 hours to complete it. Built-in private messaging system, analysis, ranking, commenting, voting and many other features are available as you discover SocialSpark. Keep in mind that the system is only in it’s beta stage.

Their code of ethics is rather appealing to bloggers and advertisers alike:

• 100% Audit-able In-Post Disclosure

• 100% Transparency

• 100% Real Opinions

• 100% Search Engine Friendly

If you are looking for an extra income while writing about things you like, feel free to join SocialSpark.

My backup experience

As I have limited knowledge related to backups that involve more than 20 machines I will focus more on backups for home users. Related to home made backups I recall my first experience dated back in 2002. I remember I was then using Microsoft Window 2000 and Windows XP. Back then, Windows XP had a huge impact on my experience with PC’s so I started playing with it. At a point I was just feeling tired of installing Windows XP over and over, sometimes even 5 times a day.

My first contact with a backup application was with PowerQuest Drive Image. I was then using PQ Drive Image 2002 and I was pretty happy with it. It worked nicely at creating backups of my system partition and restoring them whenever my Windows XP crashed (pardon me, when I crashed it). PQ Drive Image was installed on my system just like an ordinary program. I used it for about 2 years. Before I decided to get rid of it I had some problems restoring some drive images because they were getting corrupted when they were created.

The next program I ran into was Acronis True Image. Since then i am using it (no the same version of course) and I really don’t have anything to complain about. I run it from my Hiren’s BootCD. That way I can manage backups and other useful apps (like Acronis Disk Director, Norton Ghost and many others) without needing to install them or even have an OS installed on my disks. The main reason because of which I create drive images is to gain some time when I want to do a clean install of my OS’s (currently XP, SuSe 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10). I basically restore the separate drive images and have all of my OS’s fresh and ready to use in about 10 minutes. At the moment that is my only reason for using drive images created with Acronis True Image. However I believe that in the near future I will more than surely use them for other purposes as well. As far as creating drive images for entire partitions, that is really not such a good idea because it can cost you lots of DVDs.

I manually create backups of my vital files such as web projects, different applications, scripts, websites and other important data, and store them on DVDs. Currently this is a highly trusted method for me and it works like a charm. For example I periodically create backups of my blogs, websites and a forum that I administer using CPanel. For MySQL databases I use phpMyAdmin (sometimes when remote access is permitted I use Navicat) and for the files… well, I sometimes manually download them and create archives corresponding to each site and name them in a relevant way so I in case something goes wrong I can easily restore everything back in no time.

Backup Platinum is another great software product that can help you easily create backups of different files and upload them to a web server (that is really useful if you are using an online storage service) or store them locally on your HDD, CD/DVDs, flash drive, etc. Feel free to check my other article if you want to read more about this neat program.

That’s an interesting approach, so where can i start ?

First of all, before rushing into using backups or choosing different backup solutions you might need to do a little of research. A great start would be reading some backup-related posts that describe different backup methods. Yuri wrote an article that goes far beyond that. This article starts with a very basic definition of what “backup” means. Furthermore it pretty much successfully covers elementary but important details regarding several backup solutions. The article is structured like a history lesson and it’s very easy to follow. Details are given about all backup solutions (from the earliest to the latest) in order to educate the reader and hopefully provide a clear overall view of this process called “backup”. It’s very likely that you’ll learn some new things related to backups (I know I did).

Also several links from the author’s knowledge base (and not only) are posted to offer you a quick reference in case you want to go deeper into a different subject. A decent amount of information related to network and on-line backup solutions is available. A graphic and a table, both stating that backup activity increased over the last years is also there to sustain the evolution of the process with real statistic data. Furthermore a timeline shows how the usage of storing devices and accessories developed.

Overall, after reading Yuri’s article I definitely regard the backup process with more seriousness than ever before. I even consider purchasing an USB hard disk and use it strictly as a backup device for my primary hard disk; all these just to help me sleep better.