Tag: data

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Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!

reclaim

The BarCampMadison folks are gearing up for August 28, 2010, and they’ve got something called Google Moderator in place to gauge interest in topics. I’d never heard of Google Moderator, but you see, I’m learning already… way to go BarCamp!

I’ve proposed a session titled “Reclaim What’s Yours… Take Back Your Data!” (You can vote on it if you like.) The idea is such… We spend a lot of time putting out data into other people’s streams, be it Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Delicious, Last.fm, and on and on… Our input makes these sites exist, and really, what would they be without us, the users, the contributors, the lifeblood of these sites.

Call it “user generated content” or “Social Media” or whatever… The fact is, you are probably creating content and giving it to others. Does that data still belong to you once you post it on those sites? Do you have the rights to it? How do you get it back? That’s the topic… That’s the problem… I have a few solutions, but I’m guessing others do as well.

That’s my idea…. What do you think?

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mysql backup shell script

This is what I tend to use for a simple MySQL database backup script… I wanted to post this so I can look it up when I need it. There are probably better ways to do this (tell me about them!) but this works for me. 

#!/bin/bash

DT=`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"`

mysqldump -u [USERNAME] -p[PASSWORD] [DATABASENAME] > /home/backups/[DATABASENAME]-$DT.dump

gzip /home/backups/[DATABASENAME]-$DT.dump

mysqlsm

Substitute your MySQL user for [USERNAME]. (There should be a space between the ‘-u’ and the [USERNAME])

Substitute your MySQL user’s password for [PASSWORD]. (There should not be a space between the -p and the [PASSWORD])

Substitute your MySQL user’s database for p[DATABASENAME].

Each time you run it, it will get the date with the year, month, day, hours, minutes, seconds, and use it in the name. So %Y%m%d%H%M%S would produce something like 20100711090854. If you are running one backup per day, you could shorten it to %Y%m%d.

This would put the files in the /home/backups directory. Set this to wherever you want the files to go.

The gzip command compresses the dumped database file. If you don’t want to compress it (and save disk space) then don’t use it.

(BTW, you don’t type the [ brackets ]. They are just there to highlight the words you need to fill in.)

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Tweet Nest: Archive Your Tweets

I’ve had a renewed interest in my data lately, and that’s manifested itself in making sure I’ve got copies of my data. Those bits and pieces we so easily create on other web site? I want them. I want them “here”, where here is under my own control, on my own site, my own server, not just living in the cloud somewhere, at the whim of some 3rd party.

Twitter - Since Sept 2006 See, I’ve been using Twitter for a long time… since September 2006 supposedly. I’d love to go back and see what my first dozen tweets look like, but Twitter doesn’t allow that. I’ve been kicking myself for not saving all of that data since the beginning, but with micro-content you tend to think that a. It’s tiny, so it doesn’t matter, and b. It’ll always be there. We’ve learned (time and time again) that this isn’t the case.

About 2 years ago I was doing some Drupal work and set up an aggregator to ingest my Twitter feed, which managed to back up a large portion of my tweets, but not all of them. It was more experimenting with Drupal than trying to create a good backup. Still, I was slightly happier knowing I had some sort of archive. I still wanted something that would display my own content (tweets) on my own site.

I then found Tweet Nest. Developed by Andy Graulund (@graulund) it’s a simple open source PHP/MySQL application that does just what I wanted. It grabs your tweets from Twitter using the API, and stores and displays them on your own site. Perfect!

Tweet Nest : @raster The install was pretty painless, and I actually spent more time customizing the CSS (and I’m still not happy with what I came up with.) Of course two days after I installed it, it appeared to stop working. But alas, no worries, it was just a “rate limit freakout” with the Twitter API. After that, things have been smooth.

Tweet Nest also did a great job of grabbing all of my tweets as far back as October 2009. Not quite back to September 2006, but I’m starting to think that will never happen. But, I did manage to get tweets as far back as March 2008, thanks to another service called Backupify. Now I’ve got to find a good way to load the data into Tweet Nest, and I’ll have most (but not all) of my tweets stored on my own site.

You can find my archived tweets at rasterweb.net/micro, and just like my recent Delicious/Scuttle/bookmarks exploration, I now feel that much better about my data. (But I’m not stopping there. The next project may take quite a bit more hacking on my part, but it’s another one that’s long overdue.)

So go check out Tweet Nest if you want an application on your own server, or Backupify if you just want a nice, secure backup.

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Visitor Stats

I’m typically not one to obsess over statistics related to the visitors of this web site, but I figured I’d take a look and see what the numbers might tell me.

Stats by Browser

Firefox is the winner here, which wasn’t too surprising to me. I was surprised to see Chrome ahead of Safari though, even if by a small percentage. Of course I’m saddened that Internet Explorer even shows up at all. At least Chrome beat IE. Also, welcome SeaMonkey user!

Stats by Operating System

Too many Windows users! I’m kidding… sort of. I mean, I tend to write about things related to Macs, Linux, and open source… none of which are Windows. My assumption is that the people with corporate jobs who are forced to use Windows machines at work (but use Macs and Linux machines at home) tend to browse this site while on the job. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, welcome to both Android users, and that lone Playstation Portable user!

Stats by Browser / Operating System

Firefox / Windows users take the lead! So at least some Windows users are smart enough to install Firefox. Not surprising, as I think it’s been at least a few years since even die-hard Microsoft fans realized that Firefox is a better/safer browsing experience than Internet Explorer. As for IE being second? Those are obviously the corporate drones who do not have privs to install Firefox. At least Safari made it into the list once… Also, welcome Mozilla Compatible Agent / iPhone (what is that exactly!?) and your friend using Mozilla / Linux!

Stats by Screen Resolution

Hooray for more pixels! Is no one visiting this site on their shiny new Netbook? I spent so much time optimizing for 800×600 when I got my Eee PC.. all for naught! Those 1920×1080 screens must be all the designers I know. And that 320×396? That’d be the iPhone.

So join me in welcoming all visitors to the site… be they Chrome / Windows users, or iPad users, 1024×600 screen resolution users. Welcome!

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Data goes in, Data comes out.

Data Portability

When you’re building a web application (you know, like Twitter, or Flickr, or Facebook, or Last.FM, or Posterous) you obviously want people to put data into it, and you’re going to make it easy to do.

But are you making it easy for people to get their data out of it?

Here’s my simple rules for building a web application:

  1. Make it easy for users to get their data into your system.
  2. Make it easy for users to get their data out of your system.

That’s it. Do number 1, then do number 2, Do not stop in between number 1 and number 2.

If you’re convinced your application is amazing, you shouldn’t have to rely on lock-in to keep people using it. They’ll praise it openly, they’ll become your fans, they’ll shout it to their friends. Anything else is bullshit.