Recently I came across this interesting article on Lifehacker:

Do You Back Up Your Web Networking Life?

I thought the article and comments were very interesting, and it got me to thinking about all of the places one might have information stored on the web. Granted, sites like MySpace and Facebook probably don’t contain important business information, but what about places like LinkedIn? If you have recommendations and other interaction from people, you probably don’t want to lose that information should something happen to LinkedIn.

I looked around and did find an “Export Connections” link which allows you to download your contacts on LinkedIn. But what about all the other data? You would probably want to keep your recommendations and profile as well. To get a copy, go to your “View my profile as others see it” page and then use your browser’s “Save as…” feature to download the information to your computer (usually found in the File menu). This way, you have a copy of the text on the page and could use it to rebuild, if needed. Another method of backing up your information is to use the “Save as PDF” feature of LinkedIn. This is not nearly as complete, though. But it could help, so what the heck… it only takes a minute and could save you some measure of work.

There’s a new version of WordPress hot off the presses! It’s a good idea to upgrade to this newest version because there are some serious security flaws in 2.3.1…

Download WordPress 2.3.2 or contact us for upgrade assistance.

Along with the new year comes our new site! Hope you like it. And along with all this cleanup, it’s time once again to clean out my many tabs in Opera. I had been collecting resources for web site design because I wanted the relaunch of our site to go well. Here they are, in no particular order:

• 43 Web Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
• 6 Things to Note Before Changing Your Site Design
• Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings
• Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored
• How to Use Your Web Analytics Software to Improve Your Website
• SEO Made Easy
• How To Create a Search Engine Friendly Website

I hope you can pick up some good info on these links - I know I did!

What do you think of our new site? We’re glad to hear your opinion in the comments.

We wish you the very best of holidays and hope you have a wonderful new year. We’re very grateful to everyone we work with - thank you very much for putting your trust in us!

I really like how Google publishes the most popular search queries… here’s one of the lists for 2007:

Google Zeitgeist 2007

I haven’t tried searching for many of these questions online, but I hope people are finding some good information.

We’ve been setting up a lot of WordPress blogs lately. It’s very powerful and makes web page editing easy. While researching how to make a page to show the latest blog posts, I found this great tutorial on making WordPress do your bidding:

WordPress Theme Hacks by WebDesignerWall

These tips highlight what makes WordPress so great - solutions are simple and elegant.

I’ve been working on an interesting new project involving WordPress, and while I was looking for a plugin to display theme thumbnail images, I found a whole bunch of very cool stuff! Here’s a list of what I found, in no particular order:

• All in One SEO Pack - A simple and very powerful plugin to manage all the items that make your site attractive to the search engines. You can set the meta tags for your blog’s home page and for any individual page.
• Sabre - To protect your signup process from automated signup bots. You can enable captcha (where the user types in a security code) or a math test to verify the visitor is human.
• WassUp - Peek at what your visitors are doing while they visit your blog. This is a supplement to a normal statistics program (like Google Analytics) and has some really nice features, such as who is on your site right now, and what pages have been viewed recently.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade - Makes a backup of your blog files and database, downloads the latest version of WordPress, and sends you to the upgrade page for completion. Updating doesn’t get much simpler than this! It’s important to keep up with the latest versions, so this is a really great tool to have!
• WordPress phpMyAdmin - Gives direct access to all of the contents of your database. Very useful, but also a potential disaster… don’t use empty, drop, or delete unless you mean to do it and know what will happen!

So there you have it, some very useful plugins. As always, let us know if you want one of these or any other plugins installed. We’re happy to help!