VaultPress Stories: JeffandCrystal.com

Posted on Feb2011

The VaultPress Stories series continues with Jeffrey Paul, who maintains a personal site at JeffandCrystal.com. Jeff works in digital and social media for a large entertainment company, and shared with us his experiences with WordPress and VaultPress.

— Paul, one of the VaultPress Safekeepers

My primary WordPress site is a personal site that my wife and I use to share pictures and stories with friends and family. I also use it to blog about things I find personally or professionally interesting.

I first started my site on a CMS platform called Geeklog, an integrated photo platform called Gallery, and VizaWeb for hosting. Geeklog ended up being more than I needed product-wise and I wasn’t finding interesting plugins or designs for the site and I ended up having support and infrastructure issues with VizaWeb; that’s when I took a look at the market and switched to a WordPress/Gallery setup (using WPG2) and 1&1 hosting. I again ended up with support & infrastructure issues with 1&1 and was getting tired of the intricacies of the Gallery integration and finally switched to using DreamHost for hosting and just using the built-in WordPress media components and a personally created theme based on ones from Matt Mullenweg and the Twenty Ten theme.

I love the simplicity of the WordPress administration, the ease of testing out new themes & plugins, the ease of creating photo galleries and posts, and the more recent support of an iPhone app. I also love that it’s not Blogger or some other blogging platform handled by a corporation who may (or may not) have my best interests in mind. Knowing that the WordPress Foundation was set up to help further the open source nature that Matt Mullenweg created is even more peace-of-mind.

I had so many issues with my servers melting with various hosting providers as well as some personal PC drives failing that I decided I needed to get serious about protecting the several year investment I had made in getting photos & stories online. I forget where I first heard about VaultPress, but it was sometime last year and I decided it sounded like a decent option. I got a Golden Ticket thanks to DreamHost and decided to start out on the Basic plan and from there it only took a couple minutes and my site was on its way to a disaster-proof nirvana.

My favorite plugins are ones to publish my stories to Facebook (via Wordbooker) & Twitter (via Twitter Tools) as well as help render my site on mobile devices (via WPtouch). That, of course, assumes that folks are already using the Akismet spam filtering goodness; if you’re not, this one is an absolute MUST. I also use Google Analytics (via Google Analyticator and WordPress Google Analytics Reports) to see trends on my site & where traffic’s coming in from. One thing I’ve struggled with lately is deciding how best to host video on my site, ideally not using a service like YouTube or Vimeo who then have rights to my content, and that plays well on desktop browsers plus iOS (and other non-Flash devices); so if anyone out there has advice on that I’m all ears!

Check out JeffandCrystal.com here. If you’re a VaultPress customer and you’d like to be featured in one of our future VaultPress stories, please drop us a line. Thanks Jeffrey!

Posted in Community | 3 Comments

VaultPress Stories: 33 Charts

Posted on Feb2011

One of the best parts of working on VaultPress is hearing from active WordPress users who’ve signed up. We’re launching the VaultPress Stories series so you can hear firsthand from serious WordPress users how they got started with WordPress and why they chose VaultPress to secure their sites.

Our first story comes from Bryan Vartabedian, who runs 33Charts.com. Bryan is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas and an attending physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, America’s largest children’s hospital. He’s the author of Colic Solved — The Essential Guide to Infant Reflux and the Care of Your Crying, Difficult-to-Soothe Baby and also served as a contributing author to The Real Life of a Pediatrician.

— Paul, one of the VaultPress Safekeepers

I started blogging on TypePad in 2006 with a site called Parenting Solved. My audience was parents, and I started with the selfish intent of selling a book. Ultimately I discovered that blogging could serve as a bigger platform for my ideas. I continued until 2009 when I grew tired of peddling my doctorly ‘reassuring voice of authority.’ Social media had my interest and no one was talking about what doctors were doing in the space. So I launched 33 Charts on TypePad.

On 33 Charts I’m preoccupied with the intersection of social media and medicine although I’m apt to talk about all kinds of things. My blog is not a business. I don’t sell anything. You won’t find a ‘call to action.’ I like to think of it as something of a playground for my ideas. What works for me is that people see my thinking.

A year into 33 Charts I knew I had outgrown TypePad. I needed to take my site to the next level. My transition from TypePad to WordPress was a no-brainer. I was scared initially that my content and all of its Google juice wouldn’t translate to WordPress. But it worked fine. I’ve never looked back.

What I value most about my WordPress site is its stability and ease of use. WordPress gives me what I need to customize and optimize my blogging experience. WordPress is built for people who take their sites, design and writing seriously.

True confessions: I never backed up any of my content until several months ago. I caught wind of some very prolific writers who lost everything to hackers and corruption of different types and decided that I probably need to take this a bit more seriously. At about that time I heard from Michael Hyatt that he was using VaultPress to back up his site. Mike is really smart so I checked it out and liked what I saw.

VaultPress installation was a breeze and integration with WordPress is seamless. My dashboard allows me to see exactly what’s happening at any given time behind the scenes. VaultPress’ operation is as clean and crisp as its design.

Given the attention and passion I put into what I create, there’s no price that can be put on its secure backup. I sleep easy at night (when I’m not writing).

Check out 33 Charts here. If you’re a VaultPress customer and you’d like to be featured in one of our future VaultPress stories, please drop us a line. Thanks Bryan for helping us kick this off!

Posted in Community, WordPress | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

DreamHost Now Issuing VaultPress Golden Tickets

Posted on Jan2011

The fine people at DreamHost just announced that they’ve begun issuing golden tickets to the VaultPress beta to their WordPress hosting customers. All new WordPress installations on DreamHost will receive a golden ticket in their email after WordPress has been installed. Existing WordPress accounts that are signed up for their promotions mailing list will also receive a golden ticket over the weekend. DreamHost is one of the world’s most popular web hosting companies, and we’re very happy to be working with them to introduce VaultPress to their WordPress customers.

Posted in Announcements, Partnerships | Tagged , | 3 Comments

VaultPress Golden Tickets Now Available at Media Temple

Posted on Jan2011

Our friends at Media Temple have just announced they are now issuing golden tickets to the VaultPress beta. Media Temple serves 85,000+ customers and more than 600,000 domains from datacenters on the east and west coasts of the United States. We’re excited to be partnering with them as we begin 2011 and to introduce VaultPress to their WordPress hosting customers.

Posted in Announcements, Partnerships | 2 Comments

Rest Soundly, 3.0.4 Hotfix Deployed

Posted on Dec2010

Photo by Helena Mitsura

‘Twas two nights before New Year’s Eve, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. That rustling sound you kept hearing was actually the VaultPress Safekeepers, busily protecting all the WordPress sites under our care.

Today we released a hotfix via the VaultPress plugin that closes a recently identified security issue in WordPress. WordPress 3.0.4, released on December 29, fixes a core security bug in the WordPress HTML sanitation library, called KSES.

For VaultPress customers who haven’t yet been able to update WordPress to 3.0.4, the hotfix we’ve released will keep your site protected from this security issue. You should still update WordPress to 3.0.4 as soon as possible.

Both Basic and Premium VaultPress customers should already have been automatically updated to the latest version of the plugin, v. 0.0895. You can verify the version number by visiting your site’s WordPress dashboard, then viewing your plugins page. If your VaultPress plugin version is lower than 0.0895, you can then update the plugin manually by logging into your VaultPress dashboard, and downloading the latest version of the VaultPress plugin. Or, just contact the VaultPress Safekeeper team and we’ll take care of updating the plugin for you. We can also help you enable automatic updates to the VaultPress plugin.

Even if you’re offline for the holidays and can’t upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, rest soundly knowing your site’s protected with VaultPress.

Posted in Announcements, Security | Comments Off on Rest Soundly, 3.0.4 Hotfix Deployed