Backups are one of those things that I haven’t been very good at, mostly because of the manual process of logging in and out of so many websites that I work with. And so I started looking up WordPress backup solutions.

After searching through this list, I eventually decided on myRepono — mostly for its ease of use.

In the following screencast, I go through a setup of myRepono on a client website and detail why I chose the product. In short, I like the product and think it’s worthwhile to install.

Please do give myRepono a try now.

So I decided to go about creating my own first membership site, which I decided to call the Bangladesh Traveller. While researching which plugin I should use for the membership site I considered a lot of options. Any search on Google out there will bring you an absolute raft of choices and reviews, some of which are obviously biased and lack the voice of first-hand user-driven experience. These reviews read like sales pitches — hardly honest places to make a decision about which membership plugin to go with. If you know how affiliate programs work, I think the idea of writing such beaming reviews is to generate profits for oneself. Fair enough, but you dear internet user, should read things with a grain of salt.

But back to my site. I wanted a membership plugin that met the following requirements:

• Easy enough for me, the non-programmer to use and set up
• Well supported with a community of other developers big enough so that I wouldn’t be the first person bumping my head on every error; I could learn from others’ experiences and questions on the forums
• Integrated easily with Payment gateways so that I could get my system up and running quickly
• Not so large of a user base that my inevitable requests for support would not be met

After a lot of deliberation I eventually decided to give Your Members a go, based on some positive reviews posted at Justin Tadlock’s site. Run by a pair of developers in the UK under the name Cambridge New Media Services, I thought that the original deal was quite alright — $50 to get the basic plugin and to get me up and running. It seemed like a low commitment way to get into the game and see how I went.

I didn’t experience too many problems at first but I didn’t yet have all the content ready to go online. I needed to understand the capacities of the plugin so that I could consider a much larger client that I’m pitching for investment.

After a few months (this was back in September), the developers offered a deal by which they promised to deliver a new set of upgraded plugins to those who decided on the what they called the ‘developers’ license for a cool US$200.

A raft of new features was proposed, and I think they were pretty successful at getting people to upgrade, including me. By this time I had been loading a significant more content into my site, but I hadn’t yet crossed into the paid realm of content, just the stuff that was meant to get some test users in the door. The plugin was doing what it was supposed to, and pretty well. I saw that I was probably future-proofing myself by upgrading now.

Soon my big moment came. I then had a meeting with the big bosses and gave them my pitch. They were interested — they wanted to see more. I was successful at getting a few other content developers interested in the product too. I would need to speed up development if I could.

Eventually I found that development was getting more complicated and the selling mechanism more sophisticated. I was expecting the plugin instructions to be pretty clear like they had been in the first stages of development.

But then that’s where my problems began. Either something in the plugin wasn’t working properly — I’m not sure what as I’m not technical enough to say — or I wasn’t coding it properly in the WordPress site.

Whatever the issue, I knew I needed help. First I began searching the Cambridge New Media site, which in my opinion is rather poorly organised. A post on their blog which outlined the functions of what I wanted to do didn’t actually work like I expected it to.

And so, I began asking for support on the Your Members forums when I couldn’t figure it out. At first I was asked if I had followed the basic instructions, to which I replied that I already did. Then I stopped getting responses from the programmers.

At the moment I feel like I’m basically being ignored. I’ve posted on the forums a few times, and even sent an e-mail. But there’s been no response.

There could be a lot of other reasons for the support delays. I read on their forums that one of the two developers got very very sick last year, which is probably why the development of the Your Members plugin has been so slow. I can understand getting sick. But sick or not, YM’s development has been classically overpromised and underdelivered, in my opinion.

It could be a lack of skill on my end. While I am not a professional programmer or developer (I’m entirely self-taught), I’m pretty sure I’m not a total idiot either. The reason I bought the plugin was to enable payments on my site. But I’m finding that now that I’ve finally got my content ready, my requests for support are not being met.

This seems to be pretty hot topic around the internet, so I’ll be posting more to say how it’s going as I try and tackle these technical problems that are indeed, way over my head. But hopefully this post will help me get the developer’s attention.. Sean, Tim? Are you out there?

And now, see his new rickshaw:

Several other volunteers and I have talked and talked and talked about it, but today I finally did it. I’ve just spent Tk 10,000 (roughly $140 USD) to buy my friend Hobu a rickshaw, and, if he works hard enough, there will be a dramatic change in his income over the coming year because of it. We first met Hobu outside one of the expatriate clubs in Dhaka.

Normally, Hobu has to pay 80 taka per day in rickshaw rent fees, and on a normal day he can make somewhere between 200-300 taka. But even if he has a good day, he will still have to pay what could be 25% of his daily earnings to the rickshaw garage where he takes his rented rickshaw. His is a life of indentured labour—without assets like his own rickshaw, his ability to make more money is severely limited, and his story is one of millions in Bangladesh.

I will admit I am skeptical: the first thing I’d heard about Hobu was how he drank a third of a bottle of vodka from volunteers and got so drunk that he lost a rickshaw that evening, after peddling two other volunteers across Dhaka in the middle of the night.

But my skepticism went away when one day, I was his passenger and I made that journey across Dhaka in the middle of the night. From that day, I learned a measure of respect for these hardworking men, and especially Hobu, whose spoken English is actually quite impressive.

Later we took the time to visit his home and meet his wife and two kids, and while he is certainly persistent, he has never asked me for my charity, he has simply shared his life with me. So today, I’ve decided to help him out. And now, if you want to help me help him, I’d dearly appreciate it.

By now you’ve seen the locations where photographs can be installed onto the rickshaw. If you’d be interested in having your photograph added, please send it to me and make a donation. It’s a “pay what you can” kind of thing. Although, if you really feel like it, for $100 I will get your face custom-painted on the rickshaw plate (depicted below). Any extra money I can chase up, I will simply plow into making this rickshaw more and more elaborate and a source of pride for Hobu.

It never ceases to amaze me how little it costs to change one life in this vast country.

I’ve just brought a friend’s Mac OSX computer online using the Grameen’s EDGE service, although she was having a bit of trouble configuring it and hasn’t been able to get it online now for a few weeks. Now I assume she’ll be able to use the service all over Bangladesh, although the quality (ie bandwidth) of the service is yet to be determined. Grameen recently passed 10 million subscribers in November. Needless to say your bandwidth connection will be squeezed in with a LOT of other people. Such is the reality of internet service in Bangladesh.

I took a look and she was missing one key thing—scripts that properly configure her mobile phone to connect with Grameen’s service. In particular, she had not entered the correct APN into the phone number field. I suspect that other users out there might be experiencing similar issues.

As a result, I’ve written up a document providing some key links and instructions for users on my wiki site.

If any users out there have experiences with Grameen’s bandwidth around Bangladesh, I would like to hear what you think of the service before I consider purchasing it myself..

These instructions courtesy Precise Security:
1. Temporarily Disable USB Drive to autorun (Windows XP):

a. Open Windows Explorer or press the Windows + “e” key.
b. Right-click the drive of the USB Drive. Then select Properties. Drive Properties will appear.
c. Select the AutoPlay tab.
d. Choose Select an Action to Perform
e. At the bottom of the selection, click Take no Action, then click Apply.
f. Click OK to exit Drive Properties.

2. Show Hidden Files
a. Open Windows Explorer
b. Go to Tools > Options
c. On View tab, mark Checked the “Show Hidden Files and Folders and “Hide Protected OPerating System Files” Unchecked.

3. Delete the files manually
a. Go the USB Drive and delete autorun.inf
b. Go to C: Drive and delete autorun.inf
c. Go to C:\Windows and delete Disk Knight.exe

4. Modify Windows Registry
a. Go to Start > Run then type regedit
b. On Registry Editor, go to Edit > Find and type “knight”
c. Delete all entries it found.

5. Connect to Internet and update your AntiVirus

6. Reboot your computer in SafeMode
a. During BootUp process Press F8 continuously until selection appears
b. Use Arrow Up+Down to select SafeMode on the selections menu.
c. Hit Enter to proceed.

7. Scan your computer with an updated AntiVirus and delete all infections it founds.

Note: You may enable autorun of the USB Drive by reversing the process in Step 1.

**From August 7, 2007:**
Several users in my network are complaining about “Disk Knight,” a new program that was created by a 19-year-old in Chittagong named Ariful Islam. I used to have a link to his site here, with removal instructions, but it seems to have disappeared.

The program is meant to stop virus processes originating from USB flash disks, however, its virus like behaviour means that it is now spreading uncontrollably on computers around Bangladesh via users’ USB disks—a real nuisance for IT administrators like myself.

Users with more computer knowledge will be able to remove DiskKnight from their computers and flash disks following my instructions, however, I have already submitted samples of the file to our virus protection vendor Sophos as I’d rather not have some program stopping every process on my computer, including the useful ones! While I appreciate Mr. Islam’s wish to help the community deal with viruses, it is my belief the best approach is to educate users to protect themselves.