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A blast from the past! The following article is from one of my first websites, ca. 1999, and was updated a couple times throughout it's history. I am re-posting it here because my old website will be deprecated quite soon.

A few notes before we begin: Since the writing of this article, Time Machine came into being (along with Mac OS X 10.5), and has brought about a revolution in the way I maintain backups: my schema now is to have a local daily Time Machine backup to my external hard drive (I recommend a simple 1-2 TB External USB hard drive), then do a once-a-month DVD backup (stored offsite) of my most important files. For most home/small business users, this should be adequate.

Another revolution in data backup is the idea of backing up 'to the cloud' - with the prevalence of broadband Internet access, and the plethora of options for online storage, many companies offer solutions to online backup that were only dreamt of back in the late nineties. Some solutions I recommend: MobileMe (what I use, but not for everyone), Mozy, BackJack, and JungleDisk. (No, those aren't referral links—would I try pulling that on you?).

Backup Strategies for OS X

A question often asked on the Apple Discussion boards and by my fellow Mac users is: "How/when should I backup my Mac, and what is the best/quickest and most reliable way to do it." This is a complicated question, as there are many different ways one can go about backing up OSX.

There are three basic ways that I would like to cover in this article:

1. Using Disk Utility to quickly and easily make a complete, bootable backup to an external drive;
2. Using Carbon Copy Cloner to either (a) do the same thing as Disk Utility, or (b) to clone a certain folder or group of folders (another program that does a great job is SuperDuper!);
3. Drag-and-drop copy files and folders for a quick backup of important files.

In my quest to have worked on every Catholic website in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis*, I have finished up another Archdiocesan website today: Behold the new Kenrick-Glennon Seminary website:

The site is running on Drupal 6.10, and uses a nice assortment of modules to help with certain functions, such as the FileField Podcast module for easily adding new Podcast episodes. Most of the dynamic pages were generated using CCK and Views, two of the most versatile modules ever made for any CMS, ever.

Did you ever want to learn about the way networking and the Internet work, but only had about twelve minutes to do it? For 'networking noobs' and 'IT pros' alike, this video should bring a few good laughs, and a ton of nice information!

We're almost halfway through Lent, and Catholics in St. Louis (and around the country!) are waiting anxiously for the announcement of our next Archbishop. I'm hoping the announcement will come before the end of Lent, so we can have our Archbishop installed sometime during the Easter season (the most beautiful time of year, here in St. Louis).

A Catholic rumors blog, Whispers in the Loggia, seems to be hinting that we're 'on deck' in terms of American dioceses with empty bishops' chairs... and I hope that Whispers is right!

Here's a quick snapshot I took just a few minutes ago, of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis:

Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).