Living in northern Minnesota gives one the opportunity to see nature in ways people who live in urban and conjested areas will never experience. Two nights ago the Northern Lights shined and danced in the Minnesota skies. I spent most of the night watching and photographing the display. Here is just one photo from two nights ago … more photos via my photography blog, LakeSuperiorWaves.Com. (click upon image to view at full size)
Northern Lights Over Boulder Lake
While I have cloud storage accounts on DropBox and Google Drive, unlike many of you I only ue these services for very specific low risk purposes. When the number of online services which have been hacked rising, and the extremely low cost of purchasing HUGE external hard drives, it does not make sense to store sensitive, important personal data and files online. In addition, these the smaller of these online services might go bankrupt. Try recovering data from the cloud from a bankrupt service.
My solution is easy:
The image shown below demonstrates how with a single click I easily back up all my important data (documents, email, photos, etc). I've blacked out my file structure for security reasons. Give this process a try!
(click upon image to view at full size)
Post Update: Make certain you read the two comments from Jim and Steve. They make some very good points about backing up your computer. Expanding upon my own post, a even better solution as Steve noted would be to have your backup in a different building. I also like Jim's comments about letting your relatives know how to access your data assuming an untimely demise of yourself! Thanks guys, great comments!
Back in 2006 when I started this blog on Typepad, one of the top values delivered was using my analytics to better understand how and why new customers came to my web site. If those new customers / readers spent significant time on my site, it was always both intriguing and useful to learn what key words brought them onto NorthStarNerd.Org. However in the increased world of online data privacy Google now encrypts and makes private almost all search queries. Thus, upon browsing my blogs analytics, or a more extensive review via Google Analytics, the words "not provided" appears in my keyword search tables over 67% of the time. Thus, for more than 2/3 of my users I now have zero intelligence in terms of what attracted them to my blog.
Thankfully, there is also Google WebMaster Tools. What Google takes away with one hand is returned with the other. This service is provided at no charge, and can even be dynamically linked to your Google Analytics account. Please take a few moments to review these screenshots from both my Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools accounts. You'll see that although my analytics account provides little or no value as it relates to keyword results, my Google Webmaster Tools account provides a wealth of information.
NorthStarNerd.Org – Organic Search Results
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NorthStarNerd.Org – Google Webmaster Tools Results
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Login
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Dashboard
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Search Queries
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Links to Your Site
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Internal Links
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Index Status
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Content Keywords
End of Post.
For years I have used SnagIt for screen capture, and occasionally capture web pages and then saved that content as a pdf file. While I will still continue to use SnagIt for many screen captures, this dog has finally learned a new trick. For saving web pages to pdf, using the Google Chrome web browser yields a much better result. There are two options:
Try the basic Chrome functionality, but if … like me … you want to expand text of a web page without expanding the corresponding graphics, use Print Friendly & PDF. Here are some screenshots, and a resulting PDF file from last Summer's Upper Mississippi River – 30th Wedding Anniversary Tour Bike Tour. The pdf file was generated using Print Friendly & PDF, not Google Chrome's native print capabilties.
Other comments:
Click upon any screenshot to view at full size and resolution.
Adobe Reader Settings: Set <View><Page Display> to <Single Page Contiuous>
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Google PDF Print Screenshot #1
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Google PDF Print Screenshot #2
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Print Friendly & PDF