Google Web Accessibility Online Course

Helping to Improve Website Accessibility

Google are offering a new free online course named Introduction to Web Accessibility which aims to help web developers improve their knowledge of web accessibility for people who are less able.

Due to our sector we feel this is an important aspect of web development and it should be a focus for developers when designing a web application or site.

We hope to take the knowledge gained from this course and improve our website accessibly for screen readers and keyboard users.

You can find more information about this by visiting the courses website which is here and we hope to write some future articles discussing our new accessibility improvements.

Desktop Backup Using Rsync

Backing Up Over SSH Using Rsync

This article will look at our workstation backup solution which uses rsync for keeping our home directories in sync with a directory on a NAS over SSH.

Its not a smart backup or anything just uses rsync to synchronise our home directories and any working directories, adding any new files and removing any that have been deleted.

Our workstations are the source and the NAS is the destination so if anything goes wrong with our systems we can just rsync them backup and use our installed package list to restore our workstation with minimal interaction.

rsync

Doing the Backup

For the command to do the work its just a simple one liner to instruct rsync what to backup and to were and passing any command arguments to control options.

chris@chic:~# rsync -avz --delete /home/chris chris@192.168.0.123:/home/Private/Backup

The above command uses the -a switch for making an archive the -v makes the program more verbose -z compresses and finally the --delete removes any files from the destination which were deleted from the source.

Using this will keep the two directories in complete sync but also will not keep any files which have been deleted from the source which is what we require.

You can get more information about rsync and its command arguments by reading the man page which is here or just run man rsync from a shell prompt.

Conclusion

As you can see from this article keeping two directories in sync using rsync is a very simple task and can provide a "casual" backup solution for desktops or workstations.

On a side note our new Reddit and Google+ social media pages are doing well and we have been seeing some referrals from these to our website so we hope to build upon this and improve our offerings and community.

Backup Package List on Debian

Using dpkg

One thing we do on both our servers and workstation is to backup the installed package list in case we need to rebuild the system we can make sure it has exactly the same programs available.

Using dpkg which is the Debian package manager we can dump a list to a standard text file ready for backup, for us we use Google Drive for our backup remote storage so the list will also be backed up there.

dpkg Package Manager

The Backup

We have added package backup to our server backup system and to do the actual backup is as simple as running a single command. This will dump the package list to a text file named package_list.txt

root@chic:~# dpkg --get-selections > package_list.txt

The Restore

To restore the installed packages on a fresh machine is just as simple you just use the set-selections switch when running dpkg. After running dpkg we update our package list and upgrade the system.

root@chic:~# dpkg --set-selections < package_list.txt && apt-get update && apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

Conclusion

This article show how simple a task it is to backup your installed programs so if you need to start fresh you can make sure the programs you had installed are installed again and hassle free to.

In a future article we hope to cover our system restore scripts which can be used for setting up a clean Debian minimal network install into a production ready server.

New Google+ Web Site Page

More Social Media With Google+

The Care Homes Directory has now created a new Care and Nursing home related Google+ page were we will be releasing our news articles and any promotional or related content.

We feel this will complement our other social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and we hope people might find it a useful resource.

You can view our other social media accounts by following this link to our social media page promoting our accounts.

Google+

Workstation OS Upgrades

From Maya To Olivia

Recently we upgraded our workstation operating systems from Mint 13 (Maya) to Mint 15 (Olivia) and the initial impression is positive and there are noticeable improvements.

We switched to Cinnamon from Unity which was one of the reasons for our initial switch from Ubuntu and I tend to find that I can just get on with work when using Cinnamon over Unity.

Linux Mint

Upgrade Method

For our upgrade we used the apt method of editing our /etc/apt/sources.list file and replacing the correct release names and although this is not the recommended method I have always upgrade like this and its worked.

We also use rsync to backup any files needed on the workstation so if something goes wrong we can restore the system from that source.

You can also use dpkg to dump a list of programs installed on the system so you can restore them if you need to the command to get the package listing is,

root@chic:~# dpkg --get-selections > workstation_package_list.txt

The upgrade for our workstation went through like a breeze we went from 13 to 14 without a hitch then from 14 to 15 after a few hours we had our fully upgraded system.

Impressions

Everything looked similar to the previous version although fonts and theme do look slightly different  from the previous version, I am not so keen on the font.

Hot corners got enabled again for some reason unknown so I had to disable them as I cannot stand them my mouse tends to move here and there and when I select the menu I sometimes just go to the top left corner.

I have also got double entries inside my preferences in the menu for some reason although I am very rarely in there so this is not a problem for me just a niggle. I used to tweak my systems and compile my own kernels but now I just want my system to work and Mint does that for me which in turn allows me to get on with my work.

One thing that did stop working was our eclipse ADT (Android Development Tools) install which we use for our Android development but reinstalling was simple and it is all working now I am also not sure what went wrong there.

Virtual box works fine although VMWare player will not work due to kernel module problems but I do not use this for work so again its not a problem.

Conclusion

We like Linux Mint and will continue to use it for our main workstations for the foreseeable future and hope to see it flourish.