Weekly Review #23: Balance, backups & changes afoot

So how’m I doing in my quest to re-invent my life, follow my evolving Blisses and create the life I really, really want?

Here’s the funny thing: I was finding it hard to tap out my thoughts on the keyboard tonight, so I decided to just record them on video. But being me, I couldn’t quite stop there, so I still typed in (and expanded upon) the important points below.

Which is, perhaps, a good lesson that recording myself on video may be a good way to clarify my thinking. Note to self. (And important point #5, if you think about it.)

Important points:

1) Purge and sort to get some clarity back into your life

Thank you to Lori for her comment on my last video post. I don’t like to clean/sort/organize/purge, but I always do better when I’m surrounded by order, rather than chaos. Still, I’m so resistant to doing it, that I needed the reminder of how beneficial it would be.

Hooray for reminders!

2) Back up your blog(s) and website(s)!

Don’t procrastinate on this one. Seriously.

Johnny B. Truant‘s recent post, Freaky WordPress catastrophes and site crashes, and how to prevent them, was a painful reminder of my own experience (pre-blog) of my ecommerce ketubah site being downed by hackers almost a year ago. For a month.

Oh, the pain.

I’m grateful to Johnny for kicking me into gear. The systems I already had in place (daily automatic database backups and every-few-days backups of everything on my hosting account), though good, are not enough to save my @ss if the unthinkable happens again.

So. Several hours that I could have spent making art, or writing blog posts, or doing client work, went into researching backup and security systems. Much less urgent (seemingly) than a lot of the stuff on my mile-long to-do list, but a helluva lot more important in the long run.

The upshot?

1) I set every one of my developed domains up with Sucuri.net, which monitors your sites, detects unauthorized changes (ie, hacks and malware), and (best of all) cleans everything up if they ever are hacked.

2) I bought and installed Backup Buddy, a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to back up not just your database, but your entire site. Automatically. And restores your site if you ever need it. You can back up to your server, Amazon S3, a FTP/FTPS account, or an email.

I also just signed up for Amazon S3 and sent my backup to their server with the click of a button. Voilá!

I will definitely sleep better at night knowing my data is backed up!

(Now go back up your stuff!)

3) Changes are afoot: I’m partnering on a new site!

I’ve hinted about this, but now it’s official: I am the new partner in charge of a yet-to-be-launched site called 365 Days of Genius (the link is not working at the time of this writing… stay tuned).

365 Days of Genius is just one of several networked sites in the 365 Days of Everything family, a network which so far includes 365 Days of Style, 365 Days of Growing Things, 365 Days of Startups, and about 20 others (and growing).

The 365 Days of Everything concept is the brainchild of Heather Claus, who has brought together an amazing group of partners to run the various sites, and I’m excited about the opportunity to learn and grow in this community!

Given my (ahem) complicated relationship with the concept of genius, I found it especially amusing that Heather tapped me for 365 Days of Genius, which, in case you’re wondering, will be all about creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, innovation, how the mind works, and yes, genius.

I’ll share more later as we move toward launch. The point for now is that launching this new site is going to take a lot of my time and energy for the next several months, which will probably mean fewer posts here for awhile.

Just FYI…

4) Become an organ donor

One of my mentor/heroes, Tim Sweeney, has been ill, and today I found out that he is going to need an organ transplant.

Major shit, people.

But Tim being Tim, the email he sent to keep people posted of his condition also included an appeal to do a simple thing that could save a life (probably not his own): register as an organ donor.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had the little “donor” button on my driver’s license since I first got a driver’s license. What I didn’t know until Tim’s email, though, is that there is now an online registry.

A few clicks on your keyboard, and – bam – you’re in the system, and should the unthinkable happen (which, of course, we hope never does), you’ll be logged as a donor whether you have your little donor card on you or not.

Did you also know that one donor can save eight lives?

Think about it. Make a difference. Do it, now, and tell your friends and family to do the same.

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Whew! For someone who couldn’t get any words out a few hours ago, I still managed to write a lengthy post. Nobody would ever accuse me of being concise.

As usual, write your comments below.

That’s it for this week!