So, I’ve neglected my blog. I made it not even three weeks into my whole “write once a week thing.” Oh, well. In my defense, I’ve been insanely busy. That business is probably what led to my out-of-nowhere outbreak of intestinal yuckiness that can best be described as “three days I wish to never relive.” I’m still afraid to eat solid food.

But on to better things! As you can see by the title and the little banner graphic, I will be going to Miami next month for the Future of Web Apps! I’m so excited for so many reasons. I’ve long admired Carsonified and am so thrilled to be going to one of their events! Even better, I’m going to get to cover the event as a reporter and podcaster for both Mashable and 5by5.tv!

My good friend Dan Benjamin just officially embarked on making podcasting and interviews and heck, Internet broadcasting as his career. It’s so awesome to get to see him fulfill a longstanding dream, especially in an area that he is immensely capable — and Dan is capable of so many things, but he really rocks at this!

I’ll be joining his show The Conversation to provide news and maybe some witty banter and we’ll be interviewing anyone and everyone at FOWA! By the way, listen to the first episode of The Conversation here. It’s a total iPad dissection by some really smart people. How I got included in the mix — man, someone pinch me.

Anyhoo, FOWA has a freaking amazing lineup and if you are looking for a good conference to go to where you can actually you know, put down your fucking phone and pay attention and learn shit — this is that conference. I’ve heard nothing but stellar stuff and just looking at the speakers, you can see Carsonified doesn’t fuck around. They get the goods.

I can’t wait!

For those of you not in the US (or even if you are in the US, if you haven’t heard about this before), this is what is becoming an annual tradition from AMC, where essentially, the day before Oscar night, movie fans have the chance to watch all five Best Picture nominated films back-to-back in one afternoon. For $30 you get unlimited popcorn and a ticket to each movie — plus you can come and go as you please. Sitting in a movie theater for 12 hours, watching five movies back-to-back = bliss!

This will be the third year that my mom and I will be attending the Showcase, however, this year there are a few changes. First, Grant will be coming with us. It was sweet of my mom to include us in what has traditionally been “our” thing — but we know he’ll enjoy it. Second, this year I get to liveblog the whole experience! AMC’s PR people contacted me a couple of weeks ago and asked if I would be interested in live blogging/tweeting/flickring the event, in exchange for two free passes. Since I would have done all that anyway, I jumped at the chance. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to parse all the info (my thought is that I’ll have an RSS feed tomorrow for a post that shows my tweets, flickr stuff and other thoughts — or I might just try to blog from my BlackBerry.

I’ll definitely be tweeting about the event and uploading photos to a Flickr group that @giannii created. All of the bloggers attending the Best Picture Showcase throughout the country will be using the #amcbps hash-tag so you can follow that feed to stay up to date (or to contribute).

I really think AMC totally went about promoting the even this year the right way. In years past, Entertainment Weekly has mentioned the event (that was how I found out about it the first year), and there has been some newspaper coverage or ad space, but this year they really did a good job of getting the word out using social media. A lot of this is because AMC had the foresight to hire @jpgardner as their Social Media Manager. I’ve been following Justin on Twitter for I don’t know how long (feels like forever in Twitter time) and he has a real handle on how to community engagement the right way.

Let’s look at how and why AMC Entertainment has succeeded:

• They approached bloggers and Twitter users with both an interest in film and with community connections I don’t know if I was approached because of my Twitter following or because I blogged about the Best Picture Showcase last year, but the fact that they contacted me shows that they were doing their homework. I’m a nobody, but a nobody who loves film and who interacts with a lot of other film fans.
• They really focussed on the excitement of the event The reason my mom and I will be doing this for the third year in a row (and the reason Grant is coming with us), is because this is one of the most fun movie going experiences you can have. If you’re a movie fan, there’s nothing better. Even if you are the type of person that can’t imagine spending 12 hours in a theater, this is still a great event. You’d be surprised how much time flies when you are seeing really quality flicks back to back. Plus, the AMC staff has always been incredibly great at accommodating patrons and making the experience as much fun as possible. That level of fun and excitement came through with the social media campaign.
• It’s clearly not (just) about the money A lot of companies fail at social or interactive marketing and community outreach because it is clear they just want people to shill for their stuff. This isn’t the case here. Sure, part of the campaign was to raise interest in the event through word of mouth and online channels, but it was clearly about more than that. The focus on tweeting during the event, taking photos, blogging, really making it a fun experience that you can share with your friends all over the place — makes it clear this is just about money. If it were just about money, why encourage people to interact when the event has already started? No, by doing this, not only does AMC make it clear that they aren’t wanting people to just shill for their event, they are showing that they understand that engagement is what keeps people coming back. I’ll say this — even before being approached this year, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d be doing the Best Picture Showcase this year. None. The experience has been so great in years past, it was a given. Not only that, but the experience has only increased my brand loyalty to AMC. I can’t always go to AMC because the theater down the street is a Regal and the indie theater down the street is a Landmark, but when I do have the choice, I’ve always preferred AMC. The fact that they do events like this and really try to makes stuff special only cements that loyalty.
• The price is right  As with years past, the price of a ticket is only $30 ($25 if you are a Movie Watcher card member and you buy at the box office). Five movies and unlimited popcorn for $30 is unheard of. You can get a soda with unlimited refills for about $4, and that makes the whole thing that much better. I’ll be at the newly renovated Buckhead Fork and Screen (formerly the Buckhead Backlot, also known as the place I lost my awesome Diesel hat and the place I left my cell phone in 2001 — got back the phone, not the hat ), where they serve alcohol (beer, wine) and actual food — so my experience will be even nicer than it was in the past. In this economy, $30 for a day of entertainment is a really great value. Not to mention, it’s a great way for movie lovers on a budget (and that includes me — I just moved into a bigger place and got engaged, our going to the movies budget took a backseat to new furniture, the new TV and my beautiful engagement ring). Plus, it’s an awesome way to get geared up about the Oscar’s the following night.

All in all, this is one of those movie events I look forward to the entire year. Save seeing Vertigo followed by Psycho in glorious 70mm at the Fox Theater on Hitchcock’s 100th birthday, it is my favorite movie experience ever. To quote Ferris Bueller, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”

I had an amazing time, and I met so many incredibly cool people. The fellow speakers on my panel, Jeff Croft, Dan Rubin and Garrett Dimon are all amazing, and it was a true honor to meet and speak with them. Seriously, you guys rock my world. Thank you to everyone who was nice enough to attend our session and for your feedback and comments.

J. Cornelius at Coffee Cup and everyone from Blue Flavor were such amazing hosts (Keith, Nick, and Jeff again — you all rock).

Over and beyond that, I met so many awesome people and attendees, I can’t adequately list them all now.

I’m going on vacation for a few days with Grant, so I’ll have plenty of time to write stuff up more coherently.

Suffice to say, I had an amazing weekend, met great people, drank great drinks and learned a LOT. Oh — and Grant finally saw the beauty in Django. So we can now be nerds who hack together. Yay!

Out!

Once again, Chris Murphy is the man…it just cannot be said enough! When I finally got off my ass nearly nine-months ago and actually started doing something with my website, I was truly fortunate to come across Chris’s amazing Lemon Twist theme. Not only does it have a look that I still really enjoy all these months later, it was so well-coded and feature rich that in the process of modifying it to fit my own needs, I learned tons about WordPress in the process.

I figured out how to successfully widgetize the first version of Lemon Twist that I used on this site, but when Chris updated it to be even better, my workaround broke (well, it worked but it was weird, I had to set the widgets in another theme first and then enable it). I really didn’t care enough to figure out WHY it wasn’t working, mostly because I was content to just create my own PHP sidebar elements to do stuff like Calendar, Twitter statuses, etc.

Well, Chris being the awesome designer/developer dude that he is DID care enough — so he widgetized the theme. It turns out that the functions file needed to be in a different directory (the main theme directory not the sub directory). Even better, he created some widgets that kept the customized sidebar elements he built before intact. You know, so that things like Categories and Bookmarks don’t look like total ass. He also made a stylized Twitter widget specifically for the theme that I want to publicly thank him for. Chris, THANK YOU! You can follow him on Twitter @farfromfearless

Chris was nice enough to send me his widgetized files before putting it live on his site (it is still amazing how many e-mails I get from people who love Chris’s theme and like what I did with it) and while I updated the CSS late last week, an emergency MacBook reinstall put updating the widgets on pause. I had a chance to do that tonight, editing the sidebar stuff that I changed to include my own brand of panache. I think that the latest version of WordPress allows variable sidebars to exist on different pages, but I’ll look into that later in the week.

Anyway, I just wanted to shout-out a huge thank you to Chris and also do my duty in promoting his awesome work. In this age of premium and paid WordPress themes (and I will say that I think Chris Pearson’s Thesis is flat-out AWESOME — Adii’s WooThemes are great too), Chris’s work more than stands-up — the fact that he has made his themes free out of his own personal goodwill is just another reason I’m so thankful I ran across his theme.

In fact, Atlanta is so frequently left-out of the Web Conference mix, I didn’t even KNOW that Webmaster Jam Session 2008 was going to be in my own backyard until like two weeks ago!

But thanks to CoffeeCup’s J. Cornelius, I not only KNOW about it, I’m also going to be speaking on a panel about web visibility! I’m so excited!

So many genuinely cool and awe-inspiring superstars are going to be there, Jeff Croft, Dan Rubin, Nathan Smith — my Austin roadtrip hombre Keith Robinson — I’m really, really thrilled about the whole event.

If you’re going to be in Atlanta (or want to be!) on October 3rd and 4th, and you are interested in web technologies, design, SEO or social media, this should be a fantastic conference! Spots are limited, so register now — oh, and if you use the code “REDCAT” when registering, you’ll save 20%!

If you’re going to be in town or are interested — give me a heads up via e-mail or Twitter — I’d love to meet up with you!

Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner

This is the most brilliant thing I have ever seen in regards to utilizing the web for campaign finance/exposure. Brilliant!

Had I not donated $50 to the ACLU earlier today, I would totally give it to this dude. Wow!

Stupid web tech…

And as usual, this was probably not my fault (or WordPress’s for that matter), it was Comcast or somebody. It’s working now.

Funny how right after my ISP issue gets sorted out, my website works again.

In the comments of that entry, Patrick was running into some problems — it seemed like maybe he had missed a step. It occurred to me that it might be really beneficial to have the entire process documented in a screencast, because some people do better with a visual guide, and for anyone unfamiliar with their command line, seeing what you are supposed to do can be really, really helpful.

So I whipped up a video tutorial on Thursday. I wanted to have it posted earlier, but I wanted to stream it as a QuickTime file (for optimum quality/performance) and I had to tweak the settings of the QTSS server I’m using and then figure out the best way to embed the content. I was out all day yesterday and I didn’t really get a chance to look seriously at embed options until this morning. The solution I ended up using is Shadowbox, a JavaScript AJAXy media player.

You need QuickTime or VLC or something to view the file. If you need it in another format, I can try to acquiesce

For the demo, I’m assuming you are using my backup_server.sh script, but the steps are the same even if you are using your own.

Small Player

Medium Player

Super Huge Player

Enjoy! If you have any more questions, just leave them here and I’ll try my best to answer them.

Update: I posted a video tutorial that walks through all of these steps here. I still recommend reading through this page because the video tutorial assumes that you will be following these steps.

This a tutorial for creating an automated back-up system for (mt) Media Temple’s (gs) Grid Service. Although it will almost certainly work on other servers and configurations, this is written for users who are on the Grid who want an easy way to do automated backups. I personally feel most comfortable having my most important files backed-up offsite, so I use Amazon’s S3 service. S3 is fast, super cheap (you only pay for what you use) and reliable. I use S3 to store my website backups and my most important computer files. I spend about $1.50 a month, and that is for nearly 10 GBs of storage.

You can alter the script to simply store the data in a separate location on your server (where you can then just FTP or SSH in and download the compressed archive), but this process is assuming that you are using both the (gs) and S3.

This tutorial assumes that you know how to login to your (gs) via SSH using either the Terminal in OS X or Linux or PuTTY for Windows. If SSH is still confusing, check out (mt)‘s Knowledge Base article and take a deep breath. It looks more scary than it really is.

Acknowledgements

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a GIGANTIC shout-out to David at Stress Free Zone and Paul Stamatiou (I met Paul at the Tweet-up in March) who both wrote great guides to backing stuff up server side to S3. I blatantly stole from both of them and rolled my own script that is a combination of the two. Seriously, thank you both for your awesome articles.

Furthermore, none of this would even be possible without the brilliant S3Sync Ruby utility.

Installing S3Sync

Although PHP and Perl script exist to connect with the S3 servers, the Ruby solution that the S3Sync dudes created is much, much better.

The (gs) already has Ruby on it (version 1.8.5 as of this writing), which is up-to-date enough for S3Sync.

OK, so log-in to your (gs) via SSH. My settings (and the defaults for (gs), I assume) are to place you in the .home directory as soon as you login to SSH.

Once you are at the command line, type in the following command:

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ServEdge_pub/s3sync/s3sync.tar.gz

This will download the latest S3Sync tarball to your .home folder

tar xvzf s3sync.tar.gz

This uncompresses the archive to its own directory.

rm s3sync.tar.gz</p>

<p>cd s3sync</p>

<p>mkdir certs</p>

<p>cd certs</p>

<p>wget http://mirbsd.mirsolutions.de/cvs.cgi/~checkout~/src/etc/ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>sh ssl.certs.shar</p>

<p>cd ..</p>

<p>mkdir s3backup

That will delete the compressed archive, make a directory for certificates (certs), download an SSL certificate generator script, execute that script and create a backup directory within the s3sync directory called “s3backup.”

Now, all you need to do is edit two files in your newly created s3sync folder. You can use TextEdit, TextMate, NotePad or any other text editor to edit these files. You are only going to be changing a few of the values.

I edited the files via Transmit, but you can use vi straight from the command line if you are comfortable.

The first file you want to edit is called s3config.yml.sample

You want to edit that file so that the aws_access_key and aws_secret_access_key fields correspond to those from your S3 account. You can find those in the Access Information area after logging into Amazon.com’s Web Services page.

Make sure that the ssl_cert_dir: has the following value (if you created your s3sync folder in the .home directory): /home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/certs were xxxxx is the name of your server.

You can get your entire access path by typing in

pwd

Save that file as s3config.yml

The next step is something I had to do in order to get the s3 part of the script to connect, but it may not be required for all server set-ups, but it was for the (gs).

Edit the s3config.rb file so that the area that says

confpath = [xxxxx]

looks like this

confpath = ["./", "#{ENV['S3CONF']}", "#{ENV['HOME']}/.s3conf", "/etc/s3conf"]

Writing the backup script (or editing mine)

OK, that was the hard part. The rest is pretty simple.

I created the following backup script called, “backup_server.sh” This script will backup the content of the domain directories you specify (because if you are like me, some of your domain folders are really just symlinks) and all of your MySQL databases. It will then upload each directory and database in its own compressed archive to the S3 Bucket of your choice. Buckets are unique, so create a Bucket using either the S3Fox tool or Transmit or another S3 manager that is specific for your website.

This is the content of the script:

#!/bin/sh</p>

<h1>A list of website directories to back up</h1>

<p>websites="site1.com site2.com site3.com"</p>

<h1>The destination directory to backup the files to</h1>

<p>destdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The directory where all website domain directories reside</h1>

<p>domaindir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/domains</p>

<h1>The MySQL database hostname</h1>

<p>dbhost=internal-db.sxxxxx.gridserver.com</p>

<h1>The MySQL database username - requires read access to databases</h1>

<p>dbuser=dbxxxxx</p>

<h1>The MySQL database password</h1>

<p>dbpassword=xxxxxxx</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Beginning backup process..." > $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>remove old backups</h1>

<p>rm $destdir/*.tar.gz</p>

<h1>backup databases</h1>

<p>for dbname in <code>echo 'show databases;' | /usr/bin/mysql -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword</code>
do
if [ $dbname != "Database" ];
then
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up database $dbname..." >> $destdir/backup.log
/usr/bin/mysqldump --opt -h $dbhost -u$dbuser -p$dbpassword $dbname > $destdir/$dbname.sql
tar -czf $destdir/$dbname.sql.tar.gz $destdir/$dbname.sql
rm $destdir/$dbname.sql
fi
done</p>

<h1>backup web content</h1>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up web content..." >> $destdir/backup.log
for website in $websites
do
echo <code>date</code> ": Backing up website $website..." >> $destdir/backup.log
tar -czf $destdir/$website.tar.gz $domaindir/$website
done</p>

<p>echo <code>date</code> ": Backup process complete." >> $destdir/backup.log</p>

<h1>The directory where s3sync is installed</h1>

<p>s3syncdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync</p>

<h1>The directory where the backup archives are stored</h1>

<p>backupdir=/home/xxxxx/users/.home/s3sync/s3backup</p>

<h1>The S3 bucket a.k.a. directory to upload the backups into</h1>

<p>s3bucket=BUCKET-NAME</p>

<p>cd $s3syncdir
./s3sync.rb $backupdir/ $s3bucket:

For (mt) Media Temple (gs) Grid Server users, you just need to change the “site1.com” values to your own domains (you can do as many as you want) and substitute all the places where marked “xxxxx” with your server number (again, you can find this by entering “pwd” at the command line) and with your database password (which is visible in the (mt) control panel under the “Database” module.

Make sure you change the value at the end of the script that says “BUCKET-NAME” to the name of the S3 Bucket you want to store you backups in.

Now that you have edited the script, upload it to your /data directory.

Change the permissions (you can do this either via SSH

chmod a+x backup_server.sh

Now, test the script.

In the command line type this in:

cd data</p>

<p>./backup_server.sh</p>

<p>

And watch the magic. Assuming everything was correctly input, an archived version of all your domain directories and all of your MySQL databases will be put in a folder called “s3backup” and then uploaded directly to your S3 server. Next time you run the script, the backup files will be replaced.

Check to make sure that the script is working the way you want it to work.

Automate the script

You can either run the script manually from the command line or set it to run automatically. I’ve set mine to run each night at midnight. To set up the cron job, just click on the Cron Jobs button in the (mt) Admin area:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

and set you parameters. The path for your script is: /home/xxxxx/data/backup_server.sh.

Enjoy your backups!

One note: The compressed domain archives retain their entire directory structure, as such, there is a .home directory that may not appear in Finder or Windows Explorer unless you have invisible or hidden files turned on. Don’t worry, all your data is still retained in those archives.

Update (7/27/2008): If you are getting an error that says something like Permanent redirect received. Try setting AWS_CALLING_FORMAT to SUBDOMAIN

Add the following array to your s3config.yml file AWS_CALLING_FORMAT: SUBDOMAIN

The error is either because your bucket is in the EU or there is something else funky with its URL structure. Changing that value should allow the script to perform as intended.

I’d like to thank David Chen and Devindra Hardawar for inviting me to join them — I can’t wait! Oh — for anyone who isn’t familiar — Dave and Devindra are responsible for the uber-awesome Always Watching blog. It kicks total ass!

So again, tonight, 10 PM EDT — join us live in the UStream.tv chat. I’ll post the podcast link later in the week when the recorded version goes live.