We all know how important it is to backup your stuff! I’ve been running the WordPress plugin Wp-DBManager which does a good job of backing up my database, but I’m also trying out Blog Backup Online which claims to backup and restore all your blog content (posts and comments). At first sight this seems like a good service. At the moment it’s in Beta and therefore free. There is no information about the cost later. Registering a blog and scheduling backups was easy. A recently implemented service now saves all your post images.
A potentially very useful service is that you can transfer your blog to a different platform. So if you want to transfer all your content from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress account for instance Blog Backup Online will do that for you. Currently restore is supported for Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and Live Journal.
Continue reading ‘Backup Your Blog With Blog Backup Online’
Need a local copy of WordPress (or Joomla, Drupal, Moodle..) to work on without messing with your server? One that can work from a flash drive so it’s portable or can be easily installed on your hard drive? Thanks to Colin King over at CK Marketing I came across this very easy way. WOS Portable (Web Server on a Stick ) is a free, Open Source application for Windows. Head over to chsoftware.net and download WOS Portable, plus Apache, MySqL, PHPMyAdmin and the packages you’re interested in, TYPO3, Joomla!, Mambo, Wordpress, Moodle, OS Commerce, Drupal, Xoops and more.
Installation is easy and you’ll have a web server plus you’re WordPress installation up and running very quickly. I didn’t even need to set up a database for the WordPress install, it was done automatically.
I won’t put a detailed tutorial here as there’s an excellent one at Colin’s post at CK Marketing. He’s even provided a PDF version of the tutorial!
Have fun!
Theme Test Drive allows you to choose a different theme just for the administrator. Regular readers will still see the default theme. This allows you to safely make changes to your theme before you make them public. Great if you’re developing a new theme or just tweaking your css. Just make a copy of your theme, upload to your WordPress install and tweak away until you’re completely happy!
It happens completely transparently and they will not even know that you run totally different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while test driving. 
Two related plugins this week to protect your blog from spam! I was having a big problem with Akismet labelling almost half of my legitimate comments as spam. I’ve found these two plugins take care of this problem nicely 
Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugin of the Week - Spam & Trackback Protection’
This week I’m using ‘WordPress Plugin of the Week’ to introduce BloggingZoom and the Blogging Zoom Vote Button.
BloggingZoom is a new Digg clone especially for us bloggers started by Courtney and Vic. It seems to have got off to a very healthy start and is attracting lots of attention in the blogosphere! You don’t get punished for submitting your own posts and these guys are using their knowledge of search engine ranking to push visitors to your site. I only joined a couple of days ago, submitted one post and already I’ve had more visitors from BloggingZoom than I got from BlogRush in weeks (admittedly that isn’t saying much! but I’ve seen a good increase in my traffic and in RSS subscriptions) I’ve also found some interesting new sites.
Download the Blogging Zoom Vote Button to get the Digg like button featured to the right.
For Blogger users Zybron has written a good tutorial on integrating the Blogging Vote Button on Blogger sites.
Join in, remember to zoom our fellow blogger’s posts and have fun!
Recent Comments