Not yet having tried the software myself, I was very impressed after looking at the video on the site and the features provided. Very impressive. I think I’ll try it out real soon.

So far, I am impressed with how sites are designed. I have been actually working on a more simplistic version of a theme designer for WordPress. Progress is moving along slowly.

The bad thing about Squarespace. It’s not open source. I’ll stick with WordPress as my blogging platform of choice and continue to look for ways to make it easier for everybody to use by creating plugins and looking for other plugins created by the WordPress community.

I do love finding software like this. It forces the web to progress. Hopefully, in the future, I will try out the software and let you know what I think.

I have been using it for about two weeks. I’ve installed it on 3 computers-1 Vista, 1 XP, and a Mac. It was really easy to do on each one. I can access my backed up files from each computer using the Jungle Disk client, through each OSs file browser, or any of the many other methods because it is using Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Solution) web service.

My Backup Requirements

After hearing many stories of people losing data such as images because of a hard drive going bad, I have thought what I would like a backup service to do. It’s inevitable. Your hard drive will go bad. It could be tomorrow. Or in three years. It sucks when it happens.

Everything, at least for me, is going digital. All of my family’s pictures are digital. All of our music is digital. Although in some cases I have physical copies (CDs) I don’t want to spend time to do it again. Soon I will have all of our movies converted as well. It would be horrible to lose this data. Lots of time, money, and memories gone.

A lot of data is being moved to the cloud. I don’t use a word processor any more. If I want to create a document or a spreadsheet, I do it in Google Docs. This is great for some things and bad for other reasons. But I feel very confident that I am not going to lose my data.

In the past, I have had multiple computers or hard drives and have stored backups that way. This saved me a few times. But what if your house were flooded or burnt down without you having the chance to rescue your backup. Personally, I’d be worrying about other things besides my backup in situations like this.

It is absolutely necessary that you have a backup in a different physical location.

What I Like About Jungle Disk

One of the reasons why I chose Jungle Disk is the pricing model. I pay a one-time fee ($20) for the software and then pay for what I use for bandwidth and disk space from Amazon. Free upgrades and pretty cheap

I can install the software on as many computers as I want. It runs on all OSs (at least the ones I use). The software is really easy to use. I specify which files and/or folders to backup. I can create scheduled times to perform the backups. I love the configuration options. You can add encryption. It can be used by my mom (hopefully) but is geeky enough for me.

Another great thing is that you can access your backups through your file browser. In Windows that would be Windows Explorer. If you want to backup a file, just copy it over. Again, this makes it really easy.

Oh ya. You can also restore your data if you need to.

Now I’ll get to the part I really like. It is built using Amazon S3. I can do whatever I want with the data once it is backed up. The possibilities are endless. I’m working on a few side projects to take advantage of this.

What Does JungleDisk Lack?

In a word, nothing. It is a wonderful piece of software. It was made to backup your data and that is what it does a good job at.

I highly recommend this software. I’m fairly confident that you have data that you need backed up. It’s about time you do it.

I finally got started last night. I decided to get first get Ruby working on my box. It just so happened that it just took a few extra steps after that to install Rails. It was very easy once I found the right information.

• I downloaded the latest Ruby software from RubyForge.
• Rubyonrails.org has a great write up on getting started with Rails on their wiki.
• I have a Windows development environment. I found a tutorial specifically outlining how to install Ruby on Windows.

It turned out to be a very easy process to install Ruby/Rails on Windows.

Doing some searches on the web for information showed me very quickly that there is a wealth of information available just on the web. I am going to try to find the most useful web sites and blogs on the subject to be able to use for reference when I need it. Please let me know of any that I should know about.

Initially, Rubyonrails.org seems like the best place to go for information and documentation. I subscribed to the mailing list as well. I’ll read that for a while to help me get a hag of what is happening in the Rails community.

During my lunch break today, I took a trip down to Barnes & Noble to find a good book on the subject. I ended up buying Agile Web Development With Rails.

This week I would like to install a Rails open-source app so I can see how it all works.

So this means that I am learning both Ruby/Rails and Flex. Anything else I should be learning?

I have had the account for a few months and haven’t taken advantage up to this point. I tried a few times before but quickly found out each time that it would take more than a few minutes to setup. I decided to take the time to finally do it. It wasn’t difficult-it just took a little time.

Please note that I did this on a Windows XP computer.

I had two requirements for the project:

1. Setup the subversion repository.
2. Use eclipse to perform the updates, etc.

I first started out by reading a doc (How to Setup a Subversion Repository) in Media Temple’s knowledge base. It explains how to set up your repository on the command line. The doc does a good job of explaining everything if you are going to use the command line to commit your code. In my case the doc is overkill since I will be using eclipse to do everything.

The only thing that was necessary was to create the directory where your repository will exist. I decided to name my repository ‘subversion’. You can be more original if you would like.

Next I moved to getting eclipse to work with the repository. You’ll need Subclipse, an eclipse plugin that adds Subversion integration to the eclipse IDE.

Since you must have SSH access enable to access your repository, you will add an appropriate connection string when creating a new subversion repository inside eclipse. I used this template for my connection string:

svn+ssh://serveradmin%25<customerdomain.com>@<customerdomain.com>/home/<site_number>/data/<repo-name>

Be sure to substitute your actual domain for ‘<customerdomain.com>’ (twice), your actual site number for ‘<site_number>’ and your repository name for ‘<repo-name>’.

If you need help on how to create a Subversion repository inside eclipse, refer to the help docs.

After doing this and trying to connect to the repository, I was getting the following error inside eclipse:

The system cannot find the file specified.
svn: Can’t create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.

This basically means that you need an SSH executable. I tried to get it to work with putty but I was unsuccessful. I did, however get it to work with TortoiseSVN. I found a good write-up explaining how to get everything configured correctly.

After all of that, I was able to successfully upload a few of my projects to the repository. As a porgrammer, I have been needing and wanting to do this for a while.