Recommended: Live Drive
Published May 24, 2011 | 
A technical recommendation; a long-time client just lost several months of medical data from a crashed hard-drive and has to re-enter it from printout. It will cost them $1000′s. I hate to see that.
If you are *not* running a web-driven backup solution then go set one up now; they are reasonably priced, effective and protect from exactly this problem. Here’s my favorite. I am paying about $17 a month for over 350gb of backup and online storage. There are plenty of other services, I researched quite a few, and in my assessment, this one was the best.
Live-Drive is cost-effective, easy to set-up, works on both mac and pc, and allows web-based access to files.
http://www.livedrive.com/?tid=3XJRWCF7
Once installed, it has a pretty easy to use control panel with two major services:
The briefcase service maps a web-folder to your computer as a network drive, works with mac or pc…or even FTP, so if you use Linux (like I sometimes do), you can set up a script to ftp to it as well.
Plus, there is a web interface on livedrive.com that will allow you to access, download or even view some files on-line. So, if you are ever at a client’s site, or friends, and forgot something, its there if you can get to an internet connection.
We are most interested in the back-up services. They are pretty easy to configure. At install, a wizard will walk you through set-up, and if you ever need to change settings you can open the “live drivecontrol panel” from your start menu and modify the backup settings in the services tab.
Click the “manage backup settings” you will get a file tree. To make sure that you get proper back-ups, you need to know where your various software stores the information you want to back-up. In current windows software most information is stored under the user directory under “appdata” but some older programs (like the medical billing program this client uses) store data in directories off the C:\ drive or elsewhere. You can usually find out where data is stored by looking in the software’s preferences or settings. If you have trouble, contact the vendor, or let someone like me know, who can probably find it by remote desktop if needed.
The first back-up may take several days to run, so just leave the computer on, after that, it runs small changes and goes much more quickly.
If you don’t like LiveDrive, use something, just make sure you back-up your work.
A Hoax? Well, you are still what you publish…
Published August 26, 2010 | So the girl “Jenny” quitting her job was a hoax. Check out http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/
How interesting. What I find most interesting is that this still illustrates my point. In this case actress Elyse Porterfield has become that HOPA actress who did the hilarious skit on Chive. She has over a million Facebook friends and has probably created career opportunities for herself as an actress – so long as she’s willing to leverage this image. She didn’t know what the stills were for when she took them.
Illustrates the point. In this day and age, you are what you publish on-line. If anyone out there has publications that haunt them, I would like to hear from you. I want to start a consulting service to help clients clean up past publications that cause them troubles – and good service starts with understanding the problem well. Give us a call or an email.
Say it Again: You are what you publish.
Published August 10, 2010 | I am going to reiterate this idea from a post last month because of something my wife just showed me.
In the modern age of social media, we are what we publish. If you apply for a job, its common practice to research you on the ‘net. So, I give you the case of a girl, Jenny, who quit her job yesterday morning by emailing a series of photos to everyone in her company.
http://thechive.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-her-job-on-dry-erase-board-emails-entire-office-33-photos/
Over 30k people know how Jenny quit her job, more to come, and when bloggers find out her last name, these series of photos could easily come up connected with her on a Google search. So, when Jenny applies to her next job, this is what could easily come up when the HR manager checks her out on Google before bringing her in for an interview.
Not that Jenny is in the wrong. Sexual harassment is a serious HR issue, and if she had a boss who yelled at her and made inappropriate remarks, she needed to deal with that, or quit. The problem here isn’t that Jenny was wrong to quit; the issue is how she quit. Granted its funny, but lets look at the impact on her career opportunities.
If you owned a firm and had somebody like this fellow Spencer managing it for you, would you want to know from an employee about their concerns directly? Or would you rather read it on Facebook? As an HR manager, would you rather present a candidate who has a quiet, professional history to a hiring manager, or a HoPA who reacted bitterly and quit without notice in public forum? Would you rather have a quiet level-headed broker working for you, or someone who reacts unprofessionally to unprofessional situations?
Here’s another note to think about; when you post something that someone else did online, you wield a great and terrible power over their life. Jenny sent this to her office, which wasn’t well thought through, however, somebody in her office posted it online for her, which was simply cruel and may have affected Jenny’s career for years and years to come.
Remember that Star Wars Kid video? Funny, yes. In interviews that kid said the video haunted him for years and ruined his adolescent life…and somebody else posted that for him.
Again; with great power, comes great responsibility. Having the power to post to the Internet and get the immediate attention of millions is great power. If you use it irresponsibly, then, eventually, that is how you may be known…if you use it responsibly, it can have great impact on your life.
Next up, we will do a summary review of analytics, Facebook pages and marketing strategy, going over the posts for the past few months to put them in context before moving on to building traffic.