Recently I was asked to be on the People Talking Tech Podcast to talk about my transition from college to my IT career. In the process I was also asked to write a guest blog post on the Microsoft Learning Born to Learn blog. It was quite an interesting experiencing having a conversation with someone knowing in the future people would be listening to it. The night of the recording I figured it’d be best to write the blog post so everything was fresh in my mind, I started hammering it out and boom it was done.
Many thanks to SkyDrive for the ability to embed!
If you would like to check it out you can listen to the podcast by Clicking Here. You can also read the blog post by Clicking Here.
Now I know this is an IT focused blog, but it is also my personal blog and I feel like cooking is big chunk of what I enjoy doing in my free time. Recently I’ve crafted a couple of my own recipes that I feel I’d like to share with everyone. I’ll admit some of the ingredients I found in other recipes but I did add additional things/adjusted measurements and in some cases combined two different recipes. The two I would like to share today include Matt’s Christmas Balls and Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers.
Lets start with my favorite and newest recipe!
Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers
Matt’s Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño Poppers
Ingredients
(8) 2-3″ Jalapeño’s
(1) bottle of Red Bone Alley Pineapple Ginger Teriyaki
(4) tablespoons of fresh chopped chives
(1) 8 oz. Philadelphia Cream Cheese – Softened
(1) 12 oz. package of center cut bacon
(16) Toothpicks
(2) plastic non-powered gloves
Directions
Warning: Wear gloves while handling jalapeño’s
Wash outside of jalapeño’s
Cut stem and slice jalapeño’s in half
Cut out the seed and membrane from the jalapeño’s
Be sure to wash all of the seeds off of the jalapeño’s
Place in plastic bag and let marinate with the entire bottle of Red Bone Alley Pineapple Ginger Teriyaki, place in refrigerator.
Note: How long you let it marinate is at your discretion, overnight would be ideal I just did an hour on my first attempt.
Place softened cream cheese and 4 tablespoons of fresh chopped chives in small mixing bowl, mix until it looks like it is consistent throughout.
Preheat oven to 375
Warning: This gets messy
Fill the marinated jalapeño’s with the cream cheese and chives mix, wrap with an entire slice of bacon, top with a little bit of the teriyaki sauce and place on baking pan
Note: I used stone ware for my cooking so depending on your tray baking times will vary.
Once all jalapeños are completed use remaining teriyaki sauce and top all of the poppers
Bake for 25 minutes
Insert toothpicks into each popper and consume while warm!
Matt’s Christmas Balls
Ingredients
(2) Green Onion Bunches
(3) packets of Carl Buddig Beef
(2) 8oz. Cream Cheese – softened
Garlic Powder – Guesstimation
Directions
Chop the green onions into medium mixing bowl
Slice beef into cubes, separate the bunches as you dump into bowl
Add all Cream Cheese
Begin to mix together, add your guesstimation of garlic salt (My guess is I use about 3-4 tablespoons)
Once mixing is complete shape into two small balls and place next to each other, serve with your choice of crackers
I’ve been running websites for nearly a decade now and I’ve always been interested in what brings in actual consistent visitors. In my early web days I was doing things just for fun, then I jumped into providing services. Eventually I moved back to fun and running a gaming news website. I noticed that with gaming news what was so important was being the first to post a release and getting it out there.
Well I started blogging about my career just over a year ago and I have always had very minimal visitors, after all it’s a nitch market and I do not post very frequently. I always dedicated myself to useful information or at a bear minimum original content that was completely off topic of my blog. I would get a spike in visitors obviously because I share it on Twitter and Facebook.
Something very odd happened recently though, I began getting a bunch of comments on a post that was over a month old, the first thing I thought was well maybe I’ve gone up in Google search results, I checked Google Analytics and that wasn’t it but I definitely saw an increase.
I continued to dig deeper and found where the traffic was coming from, a site called WinSuperSite. I had never heard of them so I figured I’d take a look, I saw nothing in recent news mentioning my blog so I did a search on their site and found the article. It was basically the one that was receiving all of the hits and I thought sweet they shared my original content!
After reading through the article I saw no mention of me. So I searched on the page my blog, boom a comment that was just one off where someone was explaining a way to accomplish what the article’s purpose was using my method.
After the user posted this information I have consistently been receiving more than triple my average visitors when I am not posting new content. I let this go throughout the holidays and I am still seeing the same results. So I finally came to the conclusion that Sharing original content you find online is truly the best thing you can do if you are a reader. So I would like to thank woodyu388 for being a reader and even better sharing my blog!
As I promised I would blog about the additional backup procedures I planned on putting in place after the outage I had last time. I still have more things I’d like to implement but have not had the time in the evening to do the custom development work.
Cron jobs that backup to the local file system
A WordPress Plugin that backups on a schedule to my Drop Box (WordPress Backup to Dropbox)
A Tumblr! I have setup a Tumblr and found a WordPress Plugin that automatically post everything I write to my Tumblr (Social Networks Auto-Poster)
If you would like to know a bit more detail on my backup stuff please continue reading below. …
On Thursday afternoon I started receiving alerts that both of my personal websites had gone offline, which were on separate VPS Servers through the same provider. I thought this was quite unusual because it isn’t usually simultaneous. Once I got home I looked into it and the servers were completely unreachable, I looked at my providers twitter and they had mentioned an attack on their servers that had been compromised. That is never a good sign!
Over the weekend full details came in that they had been brute forced and the hackers gained access to the physical nodes and basically they nuked the drives. They spent 3 days trying to recover the ~1000 VPS that had been destroyed and had no luck restoring mine, I had looked into it and I had no backups of my blog on my home computer and my other website the most recent backup I had locally was from July of this year. I did follow standard backup procedures and I had a script that made weekly backups… but they were stored on the local server. At this point I knew I had no choice but to start from scratch and mentioned my delima on Twitter.
I was lucky enough that @fast_edo had saw my tweet and mentioned using inurl:mattblogsit.com as a Google Search string, and BOOM! I found a lot of my articles cached. I began doing similar searches on Bing and between the two I was able to find all of my articles – the images in the cache. Now I may not have been intelligent to maintain my articles but I was able to locate all of my graphics and get my blog about 95% restored. I personally decided not to re-post some of the articles but they were things relating to #TheKrewe Shirt Design Contest, and a post that just wasn’t up to par for me.
Over the next couple of days expect to see blog posts relating to setting up backups on your CentOS Servers and WordPress Blogs because I am dedicating myself to that cause to make sure this doesn’t happen again!
