Hello world!
Have you backed up your database lately? I don’t just mean hitting the “full backup” button on your web site’s control panel; I mean backing up your databases. Because apparently the “full backup” button doesn’t do that. Neither does your web host - their vaunted “daily backups” only cover your home directory file structure. If you want your databases backed up, you’d better do it yourself.
But not by pressing the “full backup” button.
Will this be the end of Green Gabbro? Maybe. I’ve rescued the entire blog (or pretty close) from Google’s cache; I’m trying to decide if I want to go through the rigamarole of extracting all the text and importing it into a new database. It’s possible, but it’d be a huge pain in the ass; if it happens at all, it won’t be soon.
This definitely isn’t the end of my blogging career, though. I’m currently pondering a few options:
- Keep everything exactly the same (except for the web host, natch!)
- Advantages:
- Lazy!
- Community of Valued Readers remains intact
- Disadvantages:
- I will continue to feel vaguely silly about such a wafer-thin veil of pseudonymity.
- Ditch the pseudonym; start writing under my own name. This is actually my favorite choice, but I’m worried it’d come back to bite me in the ass.
- Advantages:
- No more awkwardness when I meet people off th’ blog and have to change names on ‘em.
- Might come in handy if I ever seriously pursue my fantasy career of freelance science writing
- Internet-people will cower in awe at the scientific credibility of a first-year graduate student!
- Seamless integration of crackpot blogging with crackpot letters to the editor, essays in tiny ‘zines, crackpot scientific publications, etc.
- I already thought of a cool domain name
- Disadvantages:
- I’m not even tenured as a grad student yet! Anything I write can and will be used against me by senior academics, who are conventionally considered to be petty, judgmental, and not hip to the jive of the blog revolution.
- For that matter, it might be used against me in a court of academia by people who are hip to the blogosphere, but don’t want angry feminists makin’ trouble in their nice departments, or post-docs with visible lives outside work, or whatever.
- I’d feel obliged to limit my use of the word “ass” and maybe omit some hilarious graphic details of my uterus, just to protect the squares.
- Ditch the pseudonym; pick out a new, and more thoroughly anonymous, identity
- Advantages:
- All the gory bodily fluids I can describe!
- Disadvantages:
- Maintaining any meaningful amount of anonymity is a pain in the ass
- Some of you Valued Readers would not be entrusted with the new URL
- Science blogging would have to be pretty impersonal, as even a vague description of my research interests is enough to pin me down to a very small community
- I’ve pretty much run out of good pseudonyms
So, if’n you Valued Readers would like to lend me your opinions on matters of anonymity, Internet branding, and the academic blogger, I’d appreciate it. And that goes extra for you Valued Academic Readers, and super-double-extralistic for Valued Earth Science Readers…
She’s back! : a wolf angel is not a good angel on 17 Apr 2020 at 8:48 am
[...] Go tell yami that her uterus posts are an important part of the PMS-blogosphere, and whatever her nymity is, they are oh so important and must be continued. I still refer to mine as speaking in “painful crampish”. . [...]