To Protect and Secure

Sunday March 11th, 2012 was like any other Sunday. Broderick Perkins was working on his website, DeadlineNews.Com.

Then, disaster struck—Broderick’s sticky mouse button hit a ‘Reset Theme’ button in his WordPress admin area and, poof! Months of extensive theme redesign work vanished.

Web designer file hacking, CSS tweaks, and other theme sculpting: all gone. Text links returned to a moldy orange. Content wasn’t being directed to the correct page. Social networking was kaput. All that customization, all that work—about six months’ worth—was obliterated in an instant by a sticky mouse.

“On the WordPress admin’s Appearance/Options page, there is a ‘Reset’ button at the bottom of the page with a comment alongside it: ‘Caution: will restore theme defaults’ and I accidentally clicked it with a sticky mouse. When you click the button, you should get an ‘Are-you-sure? Doing-this-will-ruin-your-life’ warning. All my theme customizations vanished in an instant. I had a minor heart attack. Luckily, I have VaultPress. VaultPress restored months of lost work from my backup files while I was taking a walk. I’m serious. The restoration was as instant as my goof.”

Special thanks to Ned Buratovich, Broderick’s web designer, who initially convinced Broderick to buy a VaultPress subscription for DeadlineNews.com. Broderick now says that site backup and protection for $15 a month is “way worth” the investment.

“It’s insurance. Why wouldn’t you insure your business when your business is data? VaultPress covered my assets big time,” says Broderick.

We could not be more pleased to have DeadlineNews.Com in the Vault. 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.

Drew Strojny, Founder, The Theme Foundry

Drew Strojny is the man behind The Theme Foundry, a small but mighty design studio that specializes in WordPress themes. Drew founded The Theme Foundry in 2008 along with Jennifer Boydstun, his wife. To date Drew, Jennifer, and Andy Adams have lovingly hand-crafted 11 sophisticated and elegant themes that you can buy for your WordPress.org install or your WordPress.com site.

For Drew, designing and coding themes for a living is a dream come true.

“The Theme Foundry started as a fun side project, that eventually turned into a real business,” says Drew. “I get to choose my own hours, work with an amazing team, and build cool stuff with WordPress. What else could I ask for? I’ve always been interested in computers and technology. Growing up I spent almost all my free time in front of a computer screen. At some point, I needed a website, and decided it would be fun to try and build one myself. I started studying the craft in my spare time and learning from pioneers like Dan Cederholm and Jeffrey Zeldman.”

Chalk, by The Theme Foundry

Among The Theme Foundry’s most recent offerings, is Chalk, a theme specific for use in the classroom.

“At The Theme Foundry, we do our best to solve specific problems, but our themes are flexible enough to be used on many different types of websites,” says Drew. “For example, our latest release, Chalk, is geared toward teachers who need a class blog. The theme works great for that purpose, but it’s also a nice fit for creative bloggers looking to share photos, videos, links, and quotes.”

The Theme Foundry team is also working on a new theme with well-known Belgian designer Veerle Pieters. For a sneak peak at some of the icons in the theme, check out Veerle’s Dribbble page.

The Theme Foundry is growing fast, and as the business has grown, Drew’s role has continued to evolve.

“My biggest challenge has been time,” says Drew. “I tend to be a slow designer, and I’m also busy trying to manage, run, and grow the business. Hiring two new team members in 2011 has really helped alleviate this problem. I now spend more time collaborating with Andy and the team than I do writing code and working in Photoshop.”

We could not be more pleased to have The Theme Foundry 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.

Maria Popova is the curious mind that powers Brain Pickings, a treasure trove of the most interesting content the web has to offer. The site combines images, videos, and thoughtful posts on art, science, technology, politics, books, history, ecology, or as Maria says, “you-name-itology.”

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.