A week or so ago I posted about blogs disappearing.

Last night, the anonymous local political blog, mydayton.blogspot.com did a vanishing act- not just from the site- but from Google and its cache.

While blogs are so much easier to update and add content to, they are also somewhat dangerous from a backup standpoint. The new version of WordPress has a backup utility built into it- but, I’m pretty sure that most people don’t back up their site onto a local computer or save their posts.
That’s probably not what happened to mydayton.blogspot.com which had some questionable material and may have been deleted because of a terms of service issue, but the point should be made to back up your site including the database daily.
Our hosting solution backs up nightly- but, if you let more than 24 hours go by we too could lose your site.
I’m not sorry to see mydayton.blogspot.com go- I’m not a big fan of anonymous political speech- I believe in signing your name to things- but, this is a good lesson to be learned for those entering the blogosphere- if you don’t own your hosting and url- someone else does. Before you put a blog up on blogger.com (blogspot.com) or wordpress.com, think about who you want having control of your material.

And as a last note- If you were looking for mydayton.blogspot.com and found this post- this is the power of WordPress and search engines. I highly recommend you look into taking the blogosopher seminar so you can learn how to do this right.

note: the site may resurface at mydayton.org or mydayton.net

both are listed with the same contact through whois (click on the site names for the registration info)

WordPress Development Blog › WordPress 2

Even though we announced the release on the 26th- and promptly installed it on this site- we thought we would update you with the official release: “Duke” – named after Duke Ellington.

The nicest features in 2.0 are the default WYSIWG text entry (which is still taking some getting used to) and the ability to customize your admin pages by just dragging around the components (thanks to a cool software technology called AJAX-which you will hear and see more of).

The new way of handling pictures is completely integrated- and will change the way photo gallerys are done- with pictures and descriptive data now going in the database instead of being separate.

The new “Roles” function makes much more sense than the old 1-10 level system- and should make working collaboratively much easier.

We are offering upgrades to 2.0 for $49 for our clients- including a complete back-up of your database and data, and then a testing of plugins- to get you back up and running quickly. You can pay the old fashioned way- or pay using pay pal in our sign-up section.

We’ve also announced our next seminar- Thursday, January 19th, 2006, 8:30 am till noon.

One of our Blogosophers sent me a link on a seminar the Canadian Marketing Association is hosting: Blogs: A Marketers’ Secret Weapon–

sure it’s an all day event- but we cover 90% of the same material and it’s only $99!

(and one other thing- we practice what we preach- their site does not use RSS on the seminar)