Drupal Website Upgrades
At Jethro we have recently been upgrading all Drupal version 5 sites to the latest security patch. There are still a few to go but all should be completed by the end of this week. There is no charge to you for this and the site is usually only down for around 15-30 minutes at night to accomplish this.

New Drupal Sites
We have been developing actively in Drupal Version 6 with now 3 client sites close to going live. We also have a test site that we have been using to trial various features and themes. If you are interested in seeing what extra features are available for you then please email me back. There are also plenty of new Drupal version 5 sites we have developed lately, though some we are unable to showcase due to non disclosure agreements.

New staff
We have some new staff to introduce to you.
Amanda took the place of Lena early his year and is handling all the weekly backups, site maintenance for those clients who have this service, and is helping with security upgrades.
Jamie is back. After his tour in China last year Jamie has come back to Australia – though he is planning on going back to China again later this year. For now he is assisting with the site upgrades, theme work and basic configuration tasks.
Matt is a new developer for us. I had the fortune of sitting next to Matt at a QUT Microsoft function and after seeing his work contracted his services. He assists Doug now with theme development for websites and is a valuable member of the team already. Matt is based between South Brisbane and Northern NSW.

The importance of backups
One of our website advertising vendors has gone offline this few days thanks to an electrical fire in a data centre. The news can be seen here http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185. This fire has put over 9000 websites down while they fix the power issues. Rest assured none of our sites are hosted in this data centre. However the potential exists that the data centre we use could experience the same sort of catastrophic failure. This is one of the main reasons we use different vendors (and different data centres) for our domain hosting and webhosting and take regular weekly offline backups of all your websites (where selected in your hosting agreement). If such a failure was to occur in our webhost data centre, we could conceivably have your site up and running inside 24 hours on a new server. If you do not currently have us managing your site maintenance and backups then drop me an email to discuss your options.

Thanks again for using Jethro for your website solutions.