We’ve been running news headlines in our RSS feed for several months now and have had quite a few people say they’ve enjoyed having that feature (if you don’t enjoy it, speak now via our contact form, or forever hold your peace). So, if you’ve been wanting to keep up to date with current mortgage news, updated twice daily, now is the time to subscribe to our news feed, where we publish our articles, as well as twice daily mortgage news headlines. Our new site launch is going to really improve on that with more sources, videos, and sound bytes.

So go for it. Free mortgage news headlines updated twice a day just by subscribing to our RSS Feed. You can subscribe now by clicking here.

If you don’t know what RSS is and would like some more information about it, you can read more over at WhatIsRSS.Com.

So, now that I let the cat out of the bag about our new site in the works, I guess we really have to get moving on it . Anyway, thanks to all of our subscribers for putting your trust in Truthful Lending dot Com to give you another perspective on the mortgage, real estate, and financial industries, we certainly hope we’ve lived up to your expectations so far. And thank all of you who put up with that survey feature we tested for a week or so recently…we got some great feedback and you can bet that a lot of those suggestions will be going into the new site, so we really do appreciate your time to those who took a moment and completed that survey.

Now, I didn’t crash the database, nor did I restore it, but what I did do is learn quite a bit in the past few hours about restoring a website back to the way it was so I thought I’d share a bit about what happened, how it happened, and how we fixed it, in case it happens to any of you.

In addition to running Truthful Lending dot Com, John runs a web design and search engine marketing company called Mirage Design Works. He was doing a bit of tweaking with a site he was working on and, being the suave web designer he thinks he is, deleted a database, ignored the confirmation message, only to realize he deleted the database for this site. It’s ok John, stuff happens, right? Anyway, the way the database was deleted, it couldn’t be recovered and, since John’s been busy setting up automatic backups for this site, he, apparently deleted the most recent backup files as well during the setup. Well, auto backup was all set to run when John deleted the database and CRASH!!, no more Truthful Lending dot Com (if you stopped by in the past several hours you’d have seen the result).

Anyway, here’s how he fixed it. And thanks to John for teaching me this in case I ever do something so dumb Just kidding!.

First, he restored the database with an older backup he made on 2/11/08. Well, we’ve had a few more articles and news stories added since then, so that didn’t do the full job. Since the other, more recent backups were deleted, he jumped on archive.org to find some older copies of the site that he could copy the newer articles from and repost them. Alas, archive.org only has this site cached up to April of 2007, so that didn’t work.

Then, he searched Google using this query…

site:truthfullending.com

In case you don’t know, that will bring up all the pages Google has saved for truthfullending.com. He had to customize the query with Google’s advanced search features to only find sites indexed since the last backup (a little over two months ago). He found all the most recent articles that weren’t in the older backup and copied the content and reposted them. He used Google’s cache feature to pull up older copies of the articles. Whenever you search Google, the pages that come up in the results will have a link near the bottom that says “Cached;” if you click on that it will pull up a copy of the page that Google has saved on their own system from the last time they visited the site. So, even though the site was down, John was able to view the copies of the pages that Google has saved on their servers, copy the article content, and repost it here.

Well, I imagine if John hadn’t gotten that taken care of I’d be spending my weekend rewriting articles…thanks for saving me that one John!

Anyway, if you notice some older articles posted as if they are new ones, this is the reason.

1. The Debt Free Calculator
   Compare the difference between making minimum payments on your debts and using the “debt rollover” method. It’s amazing how much money and time you can save while you become debt free using this strategy. Expect this calculator to be released in the next day or so.
2. Mortgage Calculator Family
   Our family of mortgage calculators will include, an amortization table calculator, a balloon payment calculator, a bi-weekly vs. monthly payment comparison calculator, a payoff time calculator to show you the time remaining on a loan given different payment amounts, and, of course, a standard payment calculator. These are our basic mortgage calculators, and we’ll be releasing some more advanced calculators over the next month that are really going to stand out as something really unique and useful.

We’ve spent a lot of time in this business and know that there are some calculations people would love to be able to do, but don’t have the tools to do it. Our goal is to provide those tools, so check back periodically this month for those calculators to be released.