How many times have you heard people saying “Make sure you back up your data regularly”?

Do you do it?  I didn’t think so.

I have a USB drive that I periodically backup my vital files to but to be honest I don’t do it nearly often enough.  In fact a few months went by and I just kept saying to myself, “I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

Well about 2 weeks ago my laptop crapped out on me and until last night it was little more than an expensive paper weight.  

I was really worried that I’d have to go out and buy a replacement, and in the meantime I was dead in the water.  I couldn’t get any writing done and now I’m way behind.

Fortunately my friend Paul is an IT guru and he was able to replace my corrupted hard drive and save most of my data.   So for the price of a new hard drive and a case of Red Stripe I’m now back in business. 

I don’t think I lost anything of importance but I’ve learned a valuable lesson and I’ll be backing up my data regularly from now on!

If you don’t have a blog of your own then you probably don’t know or care what dofollow means.

Without boring you do death, NoFollow tags were first implemented by Google to help bloggers control comment spam.  You see, links are valuable to bloggers and web site owners.  And lots of them were spamming blogs just to get a quick link back to their site.  They offered little value to the blog or its readers…they were simply trying to get something for nothing.

By tagging links as NoFollow a blogger could tell Google not to follow that link or include it in PageRank calculations.

But in my experience blogs that use the NoFollow tag usually get fewer comments and reader participation (unless the site is already established with a large following).

I don’t want this blog to be a one man soap box.  I encourage my readers to participate and I want to reward them for being a helpful member of the community.  So that’s why I decided to make comments on this blog DoFollow.

If you own a blog and comment here you will get a little PR boost.

I do this knowing that I’ll probably get hit hard with spammy comments linking back to all sorts of porn and viagra sites.  But I’ll be moderating comments anyway so hopefully I can delete those right off the bat.

I’ll also be using posting a strict commenting policy and it will be placed prominently.  My comment policy will be in a separate post and it will spell out the rules of commenting here.  If you don’t follow them your posts won’t be approved.