Like anyone else, I easily get wrapped up in my own life: my family and friends, my work, my local community, my technical community. Facebook, Twitter, cat pictures. When I took time off from work recently, I got a glimpse outside of my normal, narrow world.

An old friend of mine, Steven Werlin, lives in Haiti and helps people climb out of poverty. He needed some help with his website.

Hardware fails, and so did the old website

Years ago, I helped Steven set up his website. This was back before Wordpress had largely taken over, before the real “rise of blogs” had happened. Wikis were particularly popular at that instant, so I set the site up with a free Wiki software. It ran on a server sitting in the basement of a house in Seattle, Washington.

Time passed. I moved away from Seattle. Steven kept writing, and the website grew to over 300 essays.

But eventually one of the hard drives in that old server in the basement stopped spinning so perfectly. We were lucky: very little data was lost. (There were 2 or 3 corrupt images, and the backups of the website databases were OK. Yes, I’d set up backups, but my younger and more foolish self hadn’t set up transfers of complete backups off that server. And thank you Rich for helping me recover everything!)

A better ApprenticeshipInEducation.com

The new setup is cost effective and has a lot more redundancy. It should be a lot more reliable for Steven to write and for readers to access. It’s nothing too fancy, here’s what I configured:

• Wordpress site hosted by a cloud provider. (I like Laughing Squid.) This provides basic high availability. We don’t need a lot of 9’s.
• A free, clean, simple Wordpress theme with a static front page. (I used 2012.) Wordpress is pretty darn user friendly for authors and readers, and the theme is simple enough that it isn’t so bad reading the site on a phone or tablet.
• Regular backups to a different cloud site. (I like Vaultpress.) This provides some disaster recovery, as well as the ability to go back in time if anything’s accidentally deleted from the UI or if the site gets compromised.

Getting that all set up was fast. Moving in all the old post content and images took a lot longer, because all the posts were stored in Wiki format and the images were in a variety of subfolders. (The Add From Server plugin was a lifesaver in the migration process.)

But there was a perk to the work of migrating the content post by post: I learned a lot.

Get a glimpse into microcredit programs in Haiti

Steven works with programs that are part of Fonkoze. He helps identify people who can successfully work through the microfinance programs and transform their own lives. He writes about the way the programs run, the people they help. He writes about successes and struggles. When you read his writing, you get a glimpse into a world that is probably very different than your normal life.

When you have a few moments, visit ApprenticeshipInEducation.com and read for a while.