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So we have not made it a secret on this blog that we are big fans of VaultPress as a product (Disclosure: They are advertisers on this blog). I have been using it on this blog (amongst others) for our protection and have happily paid for our privilege and peace of mind. It has been a little rocky to get started and we have offered and received help and feedback for the issues we ran into during the initial sync with VaultPress. The peace of mind is satisfying, the support is very reasonable, the product is a “set it and forget it” and as such, it runs on its own. I check the security area once in a while and marvel at the number of comments and other statistics that are mildly interesting but not all that helpful.

Then I noticed something last morning that made me think. I know that does not happen often but I like it when it does. I happened to click on the “Activity Log” tab on the VaultPress dashboard and found the following.

VaultPress Activity Log

For those of you that are not the programmer types, the above is a list of all the database “writes” that this blog had performed in the last 3 minutes. Also for the non-programmer types, database reads and writes for the most part, writes more so than reads, are what increases or decreases the time required to produce webpages that are generated by applications with a database back end. That was a mouthful. Simply put, in general, the less interaction with the database or the more efficient the interaction, the more efficient your page. So when I found this nicely tabulated list of database queries with past histories of each entry, I was pretty happy. Now I know which plugin(s) the above queries are from, I can remove them and/or fix them and the problem would go away.

Now back to VaultPress. What an elegant way to troubleshoot errant code that is write intensive! It acts like a scrolling database change log, along with the recent history of all such activity, for each commit! This is the stuff of geek dreams!

Not only does the service offer you peace of mind from disaster, protect your blog from malicious file changes (version update oversights notwithstanding), it also gives you a very elegant way to perceive your blog, in real time, from the perspective of your database.

I can’t wait to find other nondescript ways that VaultPress will prove to be useful. Besides the obvious stuff, the statistics, the security and now the activity log, what other gems have you found hidden in the vaults of VaultPress?

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help.

When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET.

If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you.

Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to Akismet’s pattern monitoring, the Akismet team can easily track the source of these parasite spammers and notify the site’s owner, but there’s little they can do if they can’t get in touch with you. Since contact forms can break without warning, the Akismet team recommends that you provide a traditional abuse@yourdomain email address. If you don’t want to make this email address public, at least contact Akismet and have it placed on file.

Are you using Akismet on your social network or online publishing service? With so many options available, why not try it today? Parasite spam can hit almost any site driven by user content, so don’t forget to offer your contact information to the Akismet team.

If you know of someone, or are yourself a blogger on Vox, you should know already that Six Apart has announced plans for closing the service. Users have until the 30th of September to get their data our of Vox and into other blogging and/or CMS platforms if they so choose.

Mark Jaquith has a great suggestion on how to Import a Vox blog into WordPress or almost anything else. In short, he suggests that you import your Vox blog into a vanilla WordPress.com blog and then export it out as a WordPress export file. Then you actually have a bunch of choices of what to do with your blog. PS: Be sure to mark your WordPress.com blog as private before importing if you do not intend to make that your final destination.