The Cloud

The cloud. Do you know what it means? Why is it the latest catch phrase? What should you be doing about it. Well to sum this up, nothing. The cloud is just a made up word that some marketing person thought sounded better than API, internet, Online data and such.

You have been the using the cloud for years. You just didn’t know it was callled that. But now it is a catch phrase and everyone is jumping all over it. People are having industry meetings on it. Talking about the great advantages of it and so on. This is all baloney. Yep that is my technical catch phrase for "crap".

I suggest keeping your important stuff out of the cloud. Maintain your own data and your own servers. Just recently gmail had issues and outages. You can read about it here. This is why I would keep up with my own stuff. If google could not have recovered their data what would have been the answer to users of their cloud services. Nothing that is right you data is gone so sorry for your loss. This is a free service and no refunds will be given. There you go you put your trust in some businesses hands and expected them to actually care about you and your email.

My suggestion to you is to build up your own backup strategy and storage plan. There are places where you can go online to back up your data. Plus you really only need to keep two copies of your data and they need to be kept seperate from each other. So if you keep an online version and an at home version you are more protected than most. If the online storage fails then you have your at home version to fall back on and of course vice versa.

Another idea if you don’t want to pay for an online service to house your data is to make two back up copies and take one to work. As long as the two copies are not constantly in close proximity to each other you are pretty safe with your data.

Protecting your data is your job and not some companies. You have to take the responsibility on to yourself. When things fail you are the only one to blame if that data is lost forever.

Captcha

Well finally one of my websites is getting spam submited on the blog comments form. I tried to handle it without causing grief for my end users and alas that is not the case.

So today I implemented a captcha type solution for my blog comments on Credit Score Monster. Now you have to know basic math to be able to submit a comment on my site. I hate that I have to do this to fight off spam.

I hate spammers. What is the purpose? They have done nothing but cause me to inconvience my users when submitting comments. I don’t know what they were trying to gain. It wasn’t like they comments they were submitting actually had links to their stuff or anything. Hopefully this is the end. Next steps will be more drastic for sure.