DISQUS

I notice a pretty nice increase in traffic from StumbleUpon too. I actually don't use SU as much as I should (and anytime I get any Stumble traffic it is because someone else submitted the link), but it really is an effective way of linkbuilding.

Nice post!

Even though I've gone ahead and transitioned my main WP-install to SVN for even easier updates, I just wanted to thank you and give you kudos for all the hard work you've done with this plugin. I often use it for my MAMP installs and recommend it to people who are less tech savvy and fear upgrades.

I never had a problem upgrading the standard way, but the plugin just made it THAT much easier (and as I said, this is a godsend for people who either can't be bothered doing all the usual stuff or are truly afraid of mucking something up).

This is the type of thing that should absolutely be included in default WP-installs (it can be disabled for users who want control).

Yeah, what Paul said.

Jonathan,

Enjoy your trip! I was partially inspired by your post to put together a guide for making nightly backups of files on the Grid to Amazon S3. The post (which includes a generic backup script) is here http://www.christinawarren.com/2008/06/24/s3-ba... -- if you decide to stay with Media Temple (though it would work with any host).

I don't know what kind of solution you are using now, but I know that the $1.50 a month I spend for S3 (and I don't just use it for my website, my photos are what take up most of that space) is worth the peace of mind, knowing I have a backup every day.

I felt pretty much the same way -- until I switched to my Mac fulltime last August. At that point, Firefox 2 was so sucky in OS X (something they incrementally improved with the release of Leopard and something FF3 significantly improves upon), I found myself using Safari despite my early loathing for it -- or using Camino, the cocoa-native version of Gecko (sans plugins).

I thought I would die without my extensions -- but I didn't. In fact, because I have to use Firefox (or Camino) for blogging anything for Weblogs, Inc. (Safari doesn't work) and found that fewer extensons reduced the number of Mac conflicts (again, most of those issues are fixed), I started to evaluate how many plugins that I previously thought I had to have, really were unnecessary.

Don't get me wrong, things like AdBlocker Plus, Grease Monkey and the StumbleUpon bar are all still things I j'adore and install, but many of the other features are either already implemented into Safari (for Mac anyway, it has a built-in web inspector that is better than Firebug and that doesn't make me disable it when I use Gmail), like the ability to specifiy which element of a page you want to download (for YouTube videos and the like) or there are bookmarklets for stuff like Deli.cio.us and others. I end up having a faster browser and less crashes, due to conflicting programming that sometimes leaves a messy plugin trail.

I agree that modularity is the reason Firefox has taken off -- but I think that if they don't get a hold on some of the poorly coded plugins that can eat memory and slow things down, it could wind up being a curse.

As someone who writes for TUAW (one of the sites that had content scraped that Duncan featured in his screencast), I couldn't be happier that Duncan (and your site) are drawing more attention to this issue.

As a freelance writer, I don't like having my words and my byline splashed all over splogs or splogs that try to get around the fact that they are splogs by claiming to be a legitimate business. I don't want any misunderstanding that I'm somehow associated with those places or any of the ancillary content they republish. An excerpt -- fine. A full feed that includes our permalinks and category links (which doesn't make the thing any better to me, if anything, it makes it that much more pathetic), images (images we oftentimes create ourselves) and other site-specific information is not

I will note that AOL legal is pretty proactive about shutting down sites that are using more than just excerpts of our content -- the problem is that there are just too many sites and now "services" cropping up every day to be able to attack them all.

Jonathan,
Wow, that sounds pretty sucktastic -- glad you were able to come out of it relatively unscathed and with some new skills. I experienced my own bout of epic faildom (though it was completely, totally my fault -- http://www.christinawarren.com/2008/04/05/when-...) back in April and understand the frustration and importance of backups all too well.

As for hosts -- I'm with Media Temple and I'm quite happy (I'm on the (gs) and I manage my dad's business site on a (dv)) with the performance (after some issues right after I joined with the Grid, they appear to have almost everything worked out and are transitioning to a new system and the support (supremely helpful and nice). Having said that, I have heard nothing but wonderful, fantastic, like mind-blowing things about Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com) if you want to manage a VPS by yourself. They are just going to spit you at a command line (you choose the linux distro, you get the vanilla minimal install and then install whatever server or stack you want to use), but if you are comfortable with that, everyone I know who uses them is supremely happy.