Internet Category Archive

Online data backup using cloud computing technology

10 Replies Christopher Roberts

This is a sponsored post on behalf of Bulldog Backup. To find out more about sponsored content on Technology Bloggers, please visit our Privacy Policy.

In the past I have written about cloud computing and how cloud data storage is the future, and at the moment it is playing a key part in backup technologies, as it is now easier than ever before to backup your data online.

One firm that offer online backup services are the Glasgow based Bulldog Backup, they were founded in 2010 and offer backup solutions for both domestic and business users.

I read a statistic the other day that almost 50% of businesses reported a loss of important data in the last two years, probably why more and more firms are investing in online data backup systems!

The good thing is, online backup solutions are getting easier and easier to use, another reason why more and more people are using them. For example, with Bulldog Backup, all you need to is select the package you want to buy, you will then be emailed with your login credentials, then all you need do is login and download the relevant backup client – either Windows or Mac.

When you install your backup software you are asked what you want to backed up, you can choose your entire hard disk, or just a few files – say pictures and music for instance.

Now you may be thinking that online backup storage is a great idea for most people, but you are on a connection which has a limited monthly allowance – say 40 gigabytes, you can’t afford to run the backup system, in fear of going over your allowance.

There is a solution to this too. With most good backup systems nowadays, you can configure how much bandwidth is used for backups, therefore you never go over your limit. You can also choose which files the software should prioritise the backing up of – e.g. give pictures and documents high priority, whilst don’t worry so much about music.

Select how much bandwidth online backup can use

Select how much of your bandwidth Bulldog Backup can use

The best thing is, once you have backed up your files, you can easily access them from anywhere, using your own personal web portal. Bulldog Backup’s portal has a clean layout and is designed to make listening to audio files and viewing images as easy as possible, all as standard. Therefore you can access all your albums whilst out and about, how cool is that! You can also install mobile apps for both iOS and Android, making it even easier for you to access your files on the move.

If you want to go up a level Bulldog Backup offer a ‘Pro’ account which has all of the standard features, with the addition of a ‘SmartDrive’ allowing you to sync files across multiple computers. A SmartDrive is basically a drive that appears like any other hard disk on your computer, only anything you store in it is automatically uploaded to the cloud – a pretty cool bit of tech don’t you think?

A screenshot of a SmartDrive

A screenshot of what the Bulldog Backup SmartDrive looks like – just another hard disk

Okay, so you like the idea of online backup, you can see the potential and benefits, but, what about the costs? Well you may be pleasantly surprised, you can start backing up online with Bulldog Backup from only £2.95 a month ($4.63) with a 1 Terabyte Protect account.

Think that is a good price? I have managed to get a discount promo code which makes the same account cost just £1.25 ($1.96) a month, and that price is fixed for 5 years! Visit the site bulldogbackup.com and use the promo code ‘bullbonanza00’ at the checkout before the 29th of February (this year) to take get started at that rock bottom price 🙂

What do you think about online backup? Will you be investing in it in the near future?

Facebook and the Inevitable End

7 Replies Jonny Hankins

Facebook is again in the press, this time about its proposed sale, or if you like the sale of the data it has collected about you and me, but Christopher addressed this issue in a post a couple of weeks ago, and I would like to raise another issue involving the mighty corporation.

Facebook state that they have over 800 million registered users, and that more than half of them use their account on any single day. Incredible stuff, it seems they have a lot to sell, but here in the US several states are trying to tackle a serious ethical and moral issue, what happens to their data when users die?

What happens when users die?

In the world about one person in every 113 will die in a year, obviously Facebook is generally used by young people who are relatively rich in that they have access to a computer, so this rate would be much lower, but even taking that into account thousands of Facebook users must die every year.

And that leads me on to the point of this, one of my more morbid posts. If these people haven’t made a will or named a benefactor for their account, what happens to the data? The current legal state of play is this; in the event of a user’s death their next of kin does not have the right to alter or take down their Facebook page. Obviously if they were in possession of the deceased person’s password they could do it (although it might be illegal to do so), but without this information they have no way of removing the data.

This is not only a question of privacy, but also of tact. Many families suffering bereavement do not like to see the deceased’s Facebook page open to the world, or even worse see the photo of their loved one in their ‘friends’ every time they open their own Facebook account. The issue is being addressed in the US with several politicians pushing for legislation that would allow family members access to deceased people’s pages, and Facebook do have a policy on freezing the accounts of dead people but it is a painfully slow process. They require death certificates and other documentation all of which takes time and is probably a very unpleasant experience.

The NC Times and Wall Street Journal both carried articles this week about a young man who posted a picture of himself with a gun in his mouth before commiting suicide and the problems his family had getting the photo removed. It remained for some time and caused a great deal of distress to many people.

On a slightly lighter note you might like the idea of life after death, and fortunately now you can have it, with the new ‘digital afterlife Facebook application’ called If I Die.

Yes you can post on your wall directly from the grave (preparation required while still in life) and communicate with your friends here back on Earth.

I have written about Facebook on a couple of other occasions regarding what I see as far from clear privacy rules, and you can read them here and here if you are interested, and you can download a free will and testament here if you feel you need it.

Here is a short report on the BBC website reporting on the problem.

Tips to improve your mobile SEO

8 Replies William Taylor

Mobile search engines contain different algorithms and bots than used for traditional web searches. They evaluate websites as it is being rendered on a mobile phone. The ranks are computed based on how well the page is rendered for the phone that submits the queries. One thing you can do to improve your mobile SEO is to make verify the user agents, and the mobile crawlers can pick up your content.

Mobile phone search engines are not as finely tuned as traditional search engines. They are still placing tons of weight on bounce rates and using mobile visitors as barometers for how websites renders on phones.

One neat suggestion in improving your mobile search results is to follow traditional SEO strategies. Mobile indexes and bots determine different from web search. The differences entail things such as alt tags; heading tags and title tags are still dominant with mobile SEO.

After performing traditional SEO strategies, it proves necessary to create a secondary mobile sheet from your website. This will allow for formatting of existing pages to be viewed on mobile phones without having to create separate content. It gives you strength with the SEO value that you have already performed on your website minus creating new pages. You can use the mobile style sheet to assist in blocking things from being rendered with using a “display: none” on the style sheet. All mobile phones with the exception of iPhones can automatically pull the “handheld” style sheet.

iPhones determine different with not searching for mobile “handheld” style sheets. In addressing this critical problem, ensure that you copy your handheld sheet, and create on that is geared for the iPhone. The iPhone is meant to render entire website pages, and people statistically still prefer mobile-formatted content on their iPhones.

What Google search results look like on a smartphoneSometimes, mobile search engines will rank traditional pages but consider them ill-suited for rending on mobile phones even with mobile-specific style sheets. When this happens, the mobile search engine will rank the traditional content but “transcode” it for viewing on mobile phones.

Transcoded versions of websites are hosted on temporary subdomains on search engine’s domains. Typically, this provides a user experience that proves under-optimized. This is because navigation sometimes is broken or misplaced and the individual pages are separated into different pages for faster downloading. This can prove problematic when it comes to tracking activity on your mobile website, and if someone links to your content, the website might not receive credit for the links. Address this problem with a “no-transform”header of your content. The no-transform in the cache-control should stop transcoding.

Next, you should include a mobile-site map. Google provides tools that can help you in building one of these. For website owners using multiple-markup languages such as WML (Wireless Markup Language) or XHTML, you should submit separate mobile sitemaps per languages being used on the website. Ensure that you link to mobile site maps in your robots.txt file, the same as you would for traditional site maps.

When you are submitting a mobile site map, add the mobile style sheet and the no-transform tag for this should confirm fitting in getting the mobile search engines to rank your content.  Another excellent tip is to make sure your traditional content will work on mobile phones. This will provide the best chance of faring well with higher numbers of browsers and phones.

If your content on your website does not include external style sheets, or contains sloppy code or too many media files, the content will have problems rending on mobile phones. You might want to make mobile-specific content on a mobile sub-directory or sub-domain. This can generate tons of problems for SEO strategists because it can end-up splitting traffic and links between two sets of similar pages.

You should use a “handheld” style sheet with the no-transform designation. You can also re-arrange code so that it proves more suited for crawling and rendering. Redirection and browser-detection and self-selection are how websites and mobile phones interact with one another. Browser detection and re-direction is the process that appears to see what browser the website visitor is using to access your website. If the mobile browser is requesting the traditional website, a single PHP script can redirect the user to the mobile phone website. If a browser is requesting the mobile website, it can redirect them to the traditional website. This proves helpful if your website out-ranks your mobile website in mobile searches.

When you think of mobile SEO, the act alone proves dangerous to create a duplicate copy of your website and placing it in a sub-domain. Most website owners think that mobile phones are capable of interpreting the duplication, but unbelievably, they can become confused. When confusion occurs, your new mobile content has a very-little chance of outranking your traditional website in the mobile searches. Redirection and browser-detection should take care of these issues, but there is always a chance of duplicate content taking away value from the content located on the main website.

If this happens, you can try using a canonical tag that will promote the value from your mobile website back to your main website. You can then rely on your browser-detection and re-direction to take care of it. What proves dangerous in this scenario is that you might hurt your rankings for searches on the primitive mobile phones. The reason is that you are pushing the total SEO value into non-mobile content.