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Well even engineers need a vacation.  I am going to be going away for a week starting the 26th.  Unlike the last time I left I am going to leave someone in charge of my sites.

So this leads me into the TIP OF THE WEEK:

Always keep track of your sites.  I know that sometimes it can get overwhelming when you have too many, but be sure to at the very least visit them once a week.  There was a time not that long ago that I left for vacation and made sure that I had no contact with the outside world.  And guess what happened….a major crack was found in both phpBB and PHP-NUKE.  This led to 5 of my sites being defaced, nothing lost but defaced, which meant that any of the traffic that I was getting from SEs and returning guests were being welcomed with a front page that said something along the lines of, “this site has been owned by…”.

To make things worse this happened at the beginning of the vacation so there was a 10 day period that they were defaced in this manner.  My traffic took a HUGE hit, I lost a lot of great contributors at the time and a lot of cred.

I had to work double as hard to get the great contributors back, even resorting to bribing a couple with free stuff.  It was around this time that I felt it was time to limit the sites that I had running for the time being.  I also relaized that if I was going to leave civilization for any amount of time I am going to be sure that there is someone else around that I trust to look over things.