Maria believes that to improve creativity, you need to expose your brain to new and varied subjects to create new connections and apply them to the work that you do. For Maria, Brain Pickings is a labor of love, and a daily journey of discovery.

“It is, above all, a self-education gateway for me.” says Maria “The things I’ve learned in the six years of doing this—through the books I’ve read and research I’ve done and the general whimsy of discovery that happens when you dive into the rabbit hole of information—far exceeds anything formal education could offer.”

On WordPress since 2007, Maria first found out about VaultPress through her studiomate, Tina Roth Eisenberg. Tina is known for her awesome design blog swissmiss.com and the international workshop series Creative Mornings, among other projects.

If she wasn’t already pouring over 450 hours each month into Brain Pickings, Maria says that she’d be running some other manifestation of cross-disciplinary curiosity.

Just a sampling of the incredible content on Brain Pickings includes advice for writers, incredible illustrations, J.R.R. Tolkien’s drawings for The Hobbit, and detailed book responses, just to name a few.

Do yourself, your brain, your creativity, and your productivity a favor: lose yourself in Brain Pickings as soon as you can.

We could not be more pleased to have Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings as a member of the growing VaultPress community. You can learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site.

What was music to our ears, was this statement on his blog:

I feared not, as I use VaultPress for my backups.

Ryan contacted VaultPress support and credits Safekeeper Brian for getting his site back online promptly.

“Due to some issue on my site or server I wasn’t able to restore it myself as you would usually be able to do easily,” writes Ryan. “I submitted an “emergency” issue but I had to wait until Tuesday morning (NZ time) for the VaultPress support to come back online! Tuesday morning came and right on cue Brian emailed me. Within about an hour he had found and fixed the problem and restored my website.”

For the full story, read Ryan’s account. Be sure to listen to some of his incredible compositions, and his musical arrangements.

Visiting laughingsquid.com is like an amazing online adventure. Need a laugh? laughingsquid.com delivers, from cute overload, to visual non sequiturs. (How can massive, mighty Great Danes be scared of so many things?) Interested in art? You’ll find everything from detailed, nature-themed, realistic anatomical illustrations, songbirds wearing military uniforms, a miniature city with 1,100 cars traveling though it, and a fantastic remake of the classic Sesame Street “Pinball 12” animation. You could visit laughingsquid.com and get lost for days. If you get hungry, you can always make a grilled-cheese sandwich.

In all, at the time of this writing, there were 13,633 posts created by 40 guest bloggers and four editors. The blog is prolific, posting between 15 and 20 times per day.

On WordPress since 2005, laughingsquid.com was an early adopter of VaultPress and is one member of the growing VaultPress community. Learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site.

If the bad guys strike, or if you accidentally muck up important settings or delete important content, simply log in to your VaultPress dashboard and choose Backups from the left-hand navigation to see a list of your site backups and choose which backup you’d like to restore.

When you click on the Restore Database button, VaultPress will prepare your data and confirm restore. If you’re sure you want to go ahead, click on the Restore Database Now button:

Some databases are large. Very large. They can take a few hours to restore. During the restore process, you’ll see a progress message within your VaultPress dashboard:

When the restore is complete, you’ll see a success message in your VaultPress dashboard:

With one-click database restores, we’ve placed the power into your hands. If you have any questions about restoring your database, or would like some help, the VaultPress SafeKeepers are standing. Simply click on the Ask for Help link in your VaultPress dashboard:

Note that the VaultPress plugin must be installed and activated on your site to access the one-click restore. One-click restore is available for all VaultPress subscribers.

Learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site. You can also meet some members of the growing VaultPress community.

Katy Widrick

“Silly Tater Tot was a blog about my journey through weight loss and healthy living while starting a new job and being a newlywed,” says Katy. “As my life changed, so did the focus of the blog. In March 2010, I re-launched my site as a social media guide for healthy living. I offer advice to people who want to make healthy changes, and share information about building community through the web and social media.”

Katy’s personal site has been on WordPress since March 2010. It’s a compendium of personal writing, tips, and inspiration on getting healthy and staying that way. It’s not so much a blog, but a vibrant community of people helping one another to meet their fitness and food goals. When you ask Katy, she’ll let you know she’s in it for the love.

“I love the fact that I can share my thoughts, opinions, struggles, and successes and connect with so many people all around the world,” says Katy. “It’s inspiring and humbling at the same time.”

Katy started using VaultPress on the advice of a friend.

“I’d been backing up my site using a WordPress plugin, but it was taking up a lot of space on my database and didn’t back up uploads, plugins or themes,” says Katy. “I started researching possible solutions, all while blogging about the search, and found VaultPress. Around the same time, a blogging friend of mine had gone through a major crash, in which she lost all of her images and many posts, and she told me that she’s recently started using VaultPress to prevent anything from happening in the future.”

Katy Widricks’s katywidrick.com is one member of the growing VaultPress community. Learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site.

Chris Coyier

Updated daily, css-tricks.com features CSS tutorials, a gallery, an awesome CSS reference guide, code snippets to grab, over 100 screencasts on specific ways to apply CSS in your projects, and an active CSS forum where visitors can get and give help with CSS problems.

Making sites since 2004, Chris credits WordPress for helping him get involved in web design with version 1.2.

“The first time I ever seriously decided that I was going to build a website, my strategy was to buy a domain name, buy some hosting, then download and install WordPress,” says Chris. “I found some free themes that were good starting points then tinkered around customizing them to my liking.”

Chris’ content is so important to him, he even did some public outreach on Twitter to get in on VaultPress a little early.

“I like to keep up with my web nerd news, so I first heard of VaultPress when it was first announced,” says Chris. “I put my name in for a Golden Ticket and I think I did a little public begging on Twitter and got in a bit before it was open. I absolutely need regular, reliable, secure backups, and more time in the day, simultaneously. So VaultPress is among the top most important services I use.”

Chris Coyier’s css-tricks.com, is one member of the growing VaultPress community. You can learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site. We promise we won’t make you beg!

Anne & Michael Bello

Michael and Anne Bello are nuts about squash. They play squash, they met on a squash court, and together, they run collegesquashassociation.com, an amazing site dedicated to playing squash at the college level in the United States.

“I’ve been playing squash since I was about 12,” says Michael. “I started playing in prep school (Williston Northampton). I loved the sport from day one. I played recreationally in college and continued on afterwards.”

On WordPress since 2009, collegesquashassociation.com publishes five times a week. In covering the college squash scene, the site offers photos, videos of squash matches, rankings, match schedules and results, as well as information on getting involved in squash at the college level. Michael says each match teaches him something new.

“Every time I cover a squash match, I learn something new about the game,” says Michael. “It could be the movement of a certain player or the tactic employed during the match. I’ve actually become a better player through reporting on matches for the College Squash Association.”

For Michael and Anne, WordPress makes it easy to publish and VaultPress offers peace of mind, knowing that the content that they’ve worked so hard to create is safe at all times.

“I created my first WordPress site to organize Western Mass squash players back in 2005,” says Michael. “The flexibility and the ease of publishing articles on WordPress is ideal. I was struggling with an easy way to back up the site’s files. I heard about VaultPress on the WordPress.org forums and through a few blogs and I instantly signed up for a “Golden Ticket.” When VaultPress finally arrived in June of 2010, I was thrilled. With the amount of articles, images, and custom themes we have on the site, VaultPress is perfect. I’ve had a few times when I’ve needed to recover certain files, and it was extremely easy with VaultPress. Plus, having Automattic perform critical patches is very reassuring.”

The Bellos’ collegesquashassociation.com is one member of the growing VaultPress community. Learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site.

John Ford will speak at WordCamp Tokyo on Nov. 27th, 2011

• Automattic as a fully distributed company and our team-based work modes,
• Commonly used tools within Automattic for building and maintaining WordPress.com,
• WordPress.com server and software setup, and
• WordPress.com server and storage statistics.

John’s talk gets underway at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, November 27th at the Shinagawa Seaside Sumitomo Fudosan Building, Tokyo, Japan.

Chris Hunter and his Moto Guzzi V7 Classic motorcycle

“I ride every day,” says Chris. “I commute to work on my Moto Guzzi V7 Classic. What I love about custom bikes is that you can see the engineering on show. You can see the engine, you can see the battery and the electrics and that’s part of the appeal for me. You can see the bits that are working.”

Running since 2008, the site profiles custom bikes and their builders several times a week. Profiles feature a detailed description of the bike and lots of compelling photographs—the love of motorcycling shines through in the care and attention to detail. When it comes to a personal favorite, Chris turns to Italy.

“I’m a big fan of Moto Guzzi, an Italian brand that has been going for 90 years,” says Chris. “Their bikes are bursting with character and style, and they’re a joy to own. I have pretty wide tastes though, and I love writing about British and European motorcycles in particular, whether they are iconic classics or modern customs.”

Chris uses WordPress for Bike EXIF, after previously running a site on Movable Type.

“I’ve used WP since 2008. I found Movable Type difficult to get to grips with,” he says. “After the MT experience, I started a second site using WP, made a few mistakes with that, and finally put everything I’d learnt into the creation of Bike EXIF. It’s now almost three years old and gets around 1.5m page views a month.”

What started off as an off-hours hobby recently turned into his full-time job.

“At first, Bike EXIF was an experiment and a hobby as much as anything,” says Chris. “Then it took off! I have just left my ‘day job’ as an advertising creative director, so I’ll be able to concentrate on the site (and sister site Cycle EXIF) full-time.”

Chris entrusts VaultPress with backing up all the content on his labor of love and was an early adopter. In fact, Chris and Bike EXIF were among VaultPress’ first customers.

“I was looking for a ‘set and forget’ backup system and was unhappy with the plugins available,” says Chris. “VaultPress sounded perfect, so I requested an invite (I think it was an early stage beta announcement) and as soon as I got one, I loaded it up.”

Chris Hunter’s Bike EXIF is one member of the growing VaultPress community. Learn more about how VaultPress can protect your content, theme, plugin, and site settings and customizations. Contact us with questions, or you could make our day, and sign up to protect your site.

Did you know that the new version also includes six new hotfixes that will automatically protect your WordPress site against known vulnerabilities?

The six new hotfixes bring the total number of hotfixes in the plugin to ten. Together, they immunize your site against known security problems that can compromise or bring down your WordPress site.

To learn more about VaultPress, check out our features. To read about just a few of the fine people who are using our plugin, check out our Community and what they’re saying. To become a member of the community, sign up for VaultPress today.