photo credit: Tony Austin

You are an extremely lucky person if you have never lost anything from your computer. As every day goes by more and more of our lives are held on hardware that at any time could fail without notice; photographs, movies, journals, business records, website files, databases, designs, contacts, emails and more.

This might sound like the introduction to a new backup solution but the truth is this is more like a self motivating post. Despite losing photographs, work and many gigabytes of MP3 I still don’t have a reliable backup solution. It is forever on my todo list and never completed, as there is always something better to be doing.

Until my inevitable post describing the loss of my entire digital life, I just wanted to talk quickly about using optical discs (DVDs and CDs especially) for backup; don’t do it.

Most likely you are using more sophisticated methods such as an external hard drive, but if you have any old backups on disc, get them somewhere safe. Why? Simply because optical discs degrade over time.

The lifespan of a DVDr could be anything from 2 years to 30 years depending on the quality, storage, temperature and exposure to light. As anyone who has burned discs before will know, even discs in the same spindle are of varying quality; some work and some don’t.

Without the need for research, debate, analysis or testing it is safe to say you shouldn’t use CDs or DVDs for backup if you have anything but short term intentions. With the amount of alternatives available, it is best just to get out of this habit and look at something else.

A quick overview of alternative methods:

• Cloud Storage – store your data online at places like Amazon S3 or Dreamhost Files Forever (my recommendation – let someone else worry about the hardware).
• Dropbox – Great automatic solution, requires no maintenance, but limited in size
• External Hard Drives – Applications like Time Machine on the Mac make this easy, but still could fail.
• Crashplan – Looked like a good solution. Similar to dropbox but with more space and scope. When I tried it took too long to upload and drained bandwidth.

Whatever backup system you use make sure it is feasible, automatic and reliable. Most importantly, just make sure you have one! (note to self…)

Suggestions, criticisms or opinions? Get involved and comment below!

Google Gears was released in mid 2007 and, as described by the big G themselves, “enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.”. This is a slightly generic explanation and the aim of this post is to show exactly what Google Gears does and how you can benefit from it.

Essentially Gears (the official name, to reflect the open source nature) extends your web browser. You perform an install at http://gears.google.com/ which is available for most modern browsers. A website can then use the following features via Gears:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

But what does this actually mean and what makes it good?

Offline Functionality – By using Gears, the application and data can be stored offline and the user can perform tasks without an internet connection. Data can then be synchronised once an internet connection is available. A great example of this is Google Mail – with gears you can view your emails, reply, send new, access your address book etc. and everything is performed once you get an internet connection. See also the todo list application Remember the Milk.

Faster Sites – Gears can store files, data and code on a local web server, meaning your machine shares the processing power and reduces the need for data transfer. WordPress implements this well in the admin area, speeding up many tasks.

Quicker Searches – Full text searching can be performed locally, meaning less server resources are used and quicker results for the user. MySpace takes advantage of this feature.

Threading JavaScript Code – On a more technical level, the WorkerPool functionality allows Javascript to be run in the background without affecting the browser. This essentially means that script execution is not stopped on the website while this Javascript is running, meaning a more user friendly experience and hopefully the disappearance of the “A script is taking a long time to run…” dialog boxes.

GeoLocation access – Google Gears can request the geographic location from the client (if there is a GPS device such as on an iPhone) or from the network information (IP address etc.). This is made simple for the coder and allows the web application to know with accuracy and efficiency where the client is located.

What else can Gears do?

Gears is still in Beta and is not recommended for public use yet (despite many Google Applications using the technology). Gears provides an interface between the website and the clients machine, meaning that in future websites will for example be able to:

• Encode video/audio locally
• Send notifications to the users desktop (e.g. Windows XP bubbles or OS X Growl style notifications)
• Access files locally
• Ability to resume file uploads
• Use the clients camera

Some important information

Google Gears needs to be implemented so this is an extra strain on lower budget websites and applications. Also, the client needs to install an extension to their browser meaning your typical user won’t have the software available. This means that at the moment only hugely popular technical/professional style sites are implementing gears.

The popular Firefox plugin Grease Monkey, which basically allows you to use scripts (or your own code) to modify websites on the fly, can be used to implement Gears features even when the website hasn’t implemented it. See the Google article Gears Monkey for more information and a script for Wikipedia.

The actual name of this technology is Gears. Google renamed it from Google Gears in order to reflect the open source direction of this project. Many people still refer to the technology as Google Gears, including myself, due to the ambiguity of Gears.

What other web applications are currently using Google Gears?

Here are a few I know about:

• Google Reader
• Google Docs
• Drupal
• Somethings
• Picasa
• Buxfer
• Mind Meister
• PassPack
• Google Calendar

Do you have any Google Gears tips, tricks, advice or questions? Get involved and comment below!

Coda by Panic - Web Development Software

I had thought about switching earlier but it was the slickness and features of Coda that persuaded me (along with Ellen Feiss of course):

Slick Interface
It is often underestimated but a well thought out user interface is really important when you are using the software daily. Menus are well designed, buttons are uncluttered and on a whole it is intuitive. This helps with motivation and encourages you to try out new features.

Integrated CSS
A single click will take you from code view to a comprehensive CSS GUI. This is perfect for when you can’t remember the syntax or want to pick a colour.

Designed for Experts
Thankfully Coda seems to have left out all the hand holding other development environments like Dreamweaver are cluttered with. You go straight into code view and your extra WYSIWYG options are only available if you seek them out.

Well Organised Sites
The way coda stores and displays your sites is ingenius. The first screen you see is filled with screenshots of your saved websites and double clicking logs into FTP and shows your files ready for working. This means you can get started on a site in seconds.

Command Line Integration
Get into the command line in a couple of clicks within the Coda environment. Login details can be saved for each site individually.

Integrated Books
HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference are included by default with other sources you can add manually. This means you can quickly look up code from within the environment.

SVN Integration
While I don’t need this anymore the integration with Subversion is well thought out and a great time saver

Work Live via FTP
The ability to work live on your files is fantastic for me. While this can be risky (I have never had a problem however) it allows you to make changes super quickly and for me speeds things up massively. If you don’t like to work live Coda will track the files you have changed locally and upload them with one click, which is almost as quick.

Search Across Files
Although this isn’t quite as strong as Eclipse yet you can still search through open files and local files quite efficiently.

Plugins
An open interface allows anyone to create plugins for the software, meaning some great addons are available like CSS Tools (compress and tidy your CSS) and PHP Validator.

Wildcards in Search and Replace
Grep or Regular Expressions don’t come naturally to me so this search and replace function is a big time saver. You can basically put a wildcard in the “Search” and “Replace” box to switch things around – it is hard to explain but easy to use.

Clips
Save little snippets of code, font families for css, standard comment headers, basic html structure or anything that will save you time and you can retrieve them with a couple of clicks.

This is just scratching the surface of what Coda can do but they are my most important features (when compared to other software). Some other cool things include the ability to collaborate on a document (live over the internet) and preview your pages.

I would love to hear what you like about Coda and maybe discover some new features – simply comment below.