The weather has been warming up; happens each year about this time, I am told. So off to the local home improvement big-box (“L” word) to grab some peat moss, vermiculiate, and compost. Brought it home, mixed up the three ingredients in equal proportions, and put it in the new garden boxes. That’s the start of this year’s experiment in “Square Foot Gardening”.

Theoretically, the process will allow for dense gardening with minimal weeds and maximum output. Plans are for tomatos, peppers, beans, and strawberries. The ‘secondary water’ (used for irrigation out here) hasn’t been turned on yet (they turn it off during winter), although it is supposed to be on in the next couple of days. Since planting time is usually around the middle of May, I have a bit of time before I need to plant. Although I have read that beans can be planted a bit before then. We’ll see what happens with the water — could be that planting may start next week.

The “FoodieFeeds” site (www.foodiefeeds.com) had a database issue yesterday morning. Luckily, I had a recent backup, so just had to restore the data and make some minor changes. I have been doing manual backups, but needed an automatic data backup process. The WordPress sites I do (this one included) have a manual process that can be automated, but I needed one for all the databases here.

So, a bit of Google-fu brought me to a site that had a quick and easy PHP program that can be run on the host server. It will backup all databases on a site, compress the file, then email it. A download, a couple of minor changes, upload and run, and the backups were emailed. Worked quite well. I’ve set it as a CRON job to automatically run once a day. If any of my three regular readers need a link to it, send a comment and I’ll let you know.

Today’s plan? Some changes to a client’s (yes, I have a client) web site, and perhaps a bit of cleaning up in the garage. And some work on the new ‘stealth’ site: I am rearranging some code to make it more efficient, which of course breaks a few functions, so minor code changes to make it all work again. I think I am on the last 10% of the coding for that site — but, like all projects, the last 10% of the project takes the most time for some reason.