Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Rescuing Posts From the Past
Its very easy to lose parts of your past, and while Google, Yahoo and Msn do good jobs of indexing and caching our records you do often find broken links to historical information.
In an effort to simplify my infrastructure (and save save some money) I have decided to change my ISP. I blame it on the iPhone - well actually the iPhone has given me a reason to properly sync some of those podcasts I've been meaning to listen to. I dutifully located some of my favorite blogs which have podcasts: Industry Misinterpretations and Hanselminutes. I also found some new contenders, Floss Weekly and the Motley Fool Moneytalk. I like having a diverse set of topics to listen to on the way to work - possibly this is akin to mental calisthenics?
Anyway it was the latter podcast (Motley Fool) which had an old conversation on ISP's, which caused me to re-evaluate my situation. Looking at some of the comparison sites I found that I was paying double for a lesser service - with the final kicker being a series of technical problems with my ISP in the last few days. That was it, I decided to switch - and I have been suprised how much easier it is to do this now. The last time I did it was more than 10 years ago, and I still remember how convoluted it was to get everything changed over. This time most things seem quite automatic - you request a MAC code (similar to the PAC code for a phone) and enter it into your new providers website, and then you cross your fingers (I guess).
Of course once the die is cast, there are other things to consider. Something I did a long time ago, was use a mail redirector (I use Pobox.com) - and while its a paid service - they have been very reliable and helpful over the years. I guess these days most people use Google for email, but before Google you generally used the email address from your ISP, and so it was painful to mail all of your contacts and get them to change your email details if you changed. This is where a redirector pays off - you keep the same email address and you just login to your service and move the destination to wherever you want email to go. This is perfect when changing ISP's (I pointed my mail redirector to deliver to the address of my ISP) but it also occurs to me that its great for technical problems as well. Even Google suffered some technical problems a few weeks ago, and for this its easy to divert your email somewhere else (or indeed - just multicast your email to several locations so that you have a backup to go to in the case of problems).
This leads me back to rescuing data from the past. In doing my final tidy up, I discovered some of my first blog posts, and also some Smalltalk projects that I had forgotten were hosted on my ISP's server. I still use those libraries, and while they are version controlled on my network they may still be useful to others and so it makes sense to move them from the old http://www.macta.f2s.com to my main website, Iterex Planning Cards.
Hopefully this post leaves some breadcrumbs for anyone doing some archaeology...
In an effort to simplify my infrastructure (and save save some money) I have decided to change my ISP. I blame it on the iPhone - well actually the iPhone has given me a reason to properly sync some of those podcasts I've been meaning to listen to. I dutifully located some of my favorite blogs which have podcasts: Industry Misinterpretations and Hanselminutes. I also found some new contenders, Floss Weekly and the Motley Fool Moneytalk. I like having a diverse set of topics to listen to on the way to work - possibly this is akin to mental calisthenics?
Anyway it was the latter podcast (Motley Fool) which had an old conversation on ISP's, which caused me to re-evaluate my situation. Looking at some of the comparison sites I found that I was paying double for a lesser service - with the final kicker being a series of technical problems with my ISP in the last few days. That was it, I decided to switch - and I have been suprised how much easier it is to do this now. The last time I did it was more than 10 years ago, and I still remember how convoluted it was to get everything changed over. This time most things seem quite automatic - you request a MAC code (similar to the PAC code for a phone) and enter it into your new providers website, and then you cross your fingers (I guess).
Of course once the die is cast, there are other things to consider. Something I did a long time ago, was use a mail redirector (I use Pobox.com) - and while its a paid service - they have been very reliable and helpful over the years. I guess these days most people use Google for email, but before Google you generally used the email address from your ISP, and so it was painful to mail all of your contacts and get them to change your email details if you changed. This is where a redirector pays off - you keep the same email address and you just login to your service and move the destination to wherever you want email to go. This is perfect when changing ISP's (I pointed my mail redirector to deliver to the address of my ISP) but it also occurs to me that its great for technical problems as well. Even Google suffered some technical problems a few weeks ago, and for this its easy to divert your email somewhere else (or indeed - just multicast your email to several locations so that you have a backup to go to in the case of problems).
This leads me back to rescuing data from the past. In doing my final tidy up, I discovered some of my first blog posts, and also some Smalltalk projects that I had forgotten were hosted on my ISP's server. I still use those libraries, and while they are version controlled on my network they may still be useful to others and so it makes sense to move them from the old http://www.macta.f2s.com to my main website, Iterex Planning Cards.
Hopefully this post leaves some breadcrumbs for anyone doing some archaeology...
# posted by Tim Mackinnon @ 9:05 AM
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