With so much of our time and lives spent online these days using sites such as Facebook, Twitter & Flickr for example, you do sometimes wonder what would ever happen to all your data if one of these services suddenly dropped off the face of the earth? Granted, its highly unlikely that they would, or that they would lose all your data – but for that one in a billion chance there is a solution!

Backupify (www.backupify.com) is a service which I came across about a month ago which offers to backup all of your online data from a whole variety of online services with little to no effort from us. After setting up the initial options and account settings, it will happily do it’s thing every day while you sit back and forget about it. I’m currently using the service to backup my Twitter, Flickr and this very WordPress blog – I could setup more, but just havn’t yet.

And what’s more, if you sign up by February 15th 2010 – you can take advantage of their current offer and get a premium account for free, so it’s worth joining even simply to check it out and decide if its the right thing for you, especially as it’s currently free!

Over the past couple days I’ve been discovering a couple new additions and changes to Google Analytics which I wasn’t aware of which I’ll mention below;

Annotations

Perhaps the biggest update I’ve noticed; you can now annotate graphs in Google Analytics so you can note anything which may have happened at that time, such as website downtime which could have affected your stats – so in 6 months time when you go back to look at your stats, you can be reminded of why there is a blip the graph.

Simply click on a date on the graph, and a pop-up box appears where you can now Create a new annotation. Couldn’t  be simpler!

This could be very useful for people who often analyise old statistics, and what’s even better – you can make the annotations private, or if you are on a shared account (for example for work purposes), you can share the annotation with everyone else who has an account so all your collegues can also see the information.

Asynchronous Tracking

A new method of tracking stats on your site has also been released which optimises how your browser loads the Google ga.js file, minimising any negative impact on user experience and allowing you to have the tracking code higher on your webpage.

More info can be found over at Google about this one and how to implement it here

Mobile Visitors

Secondly, under ‘Visitors’, Google have now seperated out the stats of visitors who use mobile devices. Quite handy if you want to analyise mobile visitors on their own without other browsers affecting the results.

Network Location

Last but not least, a very minor tweak but deserves a mention – a couple weeks ago the ‘Network Location’ section (which I seem to alway use!) was renamed ‘Service Providers’ – nothing more than just a name change!

If you’re anything like me, than trying to think of places to take photos can sometimes be a real pain. Sitting indoors, or driving around aimlessly while it’s perfect blue skies wishing you knew of somewhere to take photos – but, just like writers block – your mind is blank and you end up staying indoors or coming home empty handed. So to give you some inspiration here is a list of ideas of places and things to take some shots of.

National Parks / Countryside

If you’ve got a car, or access to a car then you’re never too far from some sort of national park or grassland to take photos. The great thing about the countryside is that it’s an ever changing landscape, so a photo you take in January is going to be completely different to one you take a few months later in April or May and so because of that they can be great places to take shots no matter the time of year and whatever the weather.

Places you could consider: Dartmoor, Lake District, Peak District, South Downs and the many London Parks

Buildings / Architecture

Never fear however, if you can’t get to the countryside or just don’t fancy the trek out there, there’s always plenty of buildings around to take some shots. From old buildings with great arhitectural features to massive modern skyscrapers there’s always something different to take. If you’re still lacking inspiration, move away from the standard shot of just a building from the side of a road, but maybe only take a photo of the corner of the building at an angle, or if it’s next to something else which looks nice (like a river) – maybe try for a reflection or something which will make your shot a little more interesting!

Shows & Events

If you live near a big city, there are always a lot of trade shows you could attend – many of which are open to the public – but be prepared to pay entry to most. Motorshows are quite a regular occurance year round, and in the summer there are many air shows which can be found all across the country.

Venues for indoor shows: NEC, ExCel, Earls Court

Special Events

Towns and cities also often play host to many special events – often in the summer months on special days or weekends. They can range from street carnivals and processions, to fireworks displays and events like car shows or air displays from the Red Arrows. Whatever it is, they can quite often be a good place to get photos, either of the event itself or just the general atmosphere they create.

A couple good sites in the London area for you to find any taking place are: Visit London and View London

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the main thing is to just get out there and take some shots! If you have any favourite places you like to take shots – leave a message below!