Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Google Trends neglected? Petition to update data regularly

Google Trends has been a great source of information. It can be used for all kinds of research. For example you can easily see why Google bought YouTube (found on digg).
But the data has not been updated since February 2007...
On the 'About' page we can read: "We'll aim to update the information provided by Google Trends monthly." Apparently it is quite difficult and/or resource consuming to update this great service.
If you feel like me and would like to see monthly updates really happening contact Google at trends-support@google.com or just leave a comment on this article and I'll forward all requests as a kind of petition to them.

Update: It looks like Google has now updated trends again - just days after this posting. Maybe it helped... ?

Friday, July 13, 2007

Best free online backup solution with versioning: mozy

I have now put quite some work into my Web 2.0 project BAOssimo!
Which made me look for the best backup solution:
  • regular
  • automatic
  • with versioning (à la Apple Leopard Time Machine)
  • free or inexpensive
  • client has to run on Mac OS X (mozy works with Windows, too)
And I finally found it: mozy
It gives me 2G of free backup space which is by far enough for the code base of the drupal CMS plus the database backup.
Setup is simplistic and now mozy backs up every change I make to the code and my nightly snapshots of the database without any further interaction on my part.
From any computer I can access the complete history of my website by just typing my login and password into their website.

Mozy is ideal for my needs. But if you want to backup your media (images, music and films) the 2G of free space is not enough anymore.
Two solutions:
  • Pay $4.95 per month for unlimited space
  • Write an article saying how happy you are about mozy - like I am doing here.
    Referals to their service increase your free space.
So, if I convinced you to use mozy, please use a link in this article to sign up. No disadvantage to you and I get some more free space ;-)