To Protect and Secure

Composer Ryan Youens has written over 130 pieces of music for the likes of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Sphaera Ensemble (Brazil), Gruppetto Quartet (Greece), and the Auckland Symphony Orchestra, just to name a few. As an arranger, Ryan has produced over 40 arrangements for ensembles and composers including the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the Auckland Symphony Orchestra, and many others. His site showcases audio samples of his musical compositions and his arrangements. Last Saturday night (New Zealand time) Ryan learned his website was down, and he’d lost all his content.

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.

Scott Beale is the founder and self-confessed primary tentacle of laughingsquid.com, an incredible blog where art, technology, humor, and culture meet on the web.

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.

Blogger Katy Widrick is passionate about keeping fit and weight loss. So much so, she’s turned her inspiring blog, katywidrick.com, into a social media guide for healthy living. Through trial, error, perseverance, and commitment, Katy shed 40 pounds over 18 months back in 2008. She’s a television producer by day who trains for triathlons by night.

“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.

If you work on the web, you’re always looking for great resources to learn new and better ways to design and code. If you’re into CSS, you probably already know about Chris Coyier’s css-tricks.com, an incredible compendium of CSS goodness.

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!