Patrick Says

I had this great idea today for a WordPress plugin someone should develop. I’m not a developer, but if you know one, send them the idea and maybe someone can write it. Heck, maybe it already exists…

It could be called the ‘Hey I’m Dead’ plugin. The plugin would once a day check the date of the last published post. If the date of the post was x number of days from today, it would publish a prepared post stating that either the blogger had died or was just not posting at a certain interval. It could even provide a link to the obituary service of the bloggers choice.

Because really, if you kicked the bucket, does anyone have the credentials needed to sign in to you blog and let people know? This is important, peeps. Let’s get this developed.

So, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re running the beta for WordPress 2.7 here. Actually, I’m digging it so much I’ve pushed it out to my personal blog as well. It’s really a nice update.

But as I’m going through the settings, I’m finding things that I think could backfire on the WordPress developers. They keep integrating plugins into the core. Now I wouldn’t say this is a bad thing completely, but if I’m a plugin developer and WordPress absorbs my plugin into the core, then all my work was pretty much for nothing. Am I making too big a deal about this?

Maybe. Maybe but not. But consider the numbers of plugins now, for all intents and purpose, dead:

• MonsterID
• Wavatar
• Identicon
• Comment Timeout
• Brian’s Threaded Comments – I’m not sure on this one. I didn’t use it, but WordPress 2.7 now will support threaded comments.

So, is this good or bad for WordPress? I don’t know. The program has to grow and add new features and I suppose adding to the core will make the feature faster than a separate plugin to run. I guess it’s open for discussion.

In this post, I’d like to talk about how to back up your blog. As I deal exclusively in WordPress self-hosted blogs, this post will be specific to that. However, the core ideas are the same for most blogging platforms. So even if you’re not using WordPress, you can still glean some good information from this post.

A blog generally consists of two parts: a database and files. If it helps, think of the database as the brain and nervous system and the files as the skeleton, skin and other bits of a person. Both of these need to be backed up or you won’t have what you need in the event of an emergency.

So, how do we back up each of these parts?

Backing up your database can be done through a variety of ways. You can go through your SQL admin area. You can export into a file. But, by and far, the easiest way I’ve found is to use a plugin called WP-DB-Backup. The beauty of this plugin, once installed, is that it automates the process of backing up your database. Even better, it can be configured to simply email you the file. You can then save it on your hard drive and know you have that piece safely tucked away.

That leaves the files. The files are the multiple directories you see when you log into your FTP client. Critically, there is a root directory and three subdirectories: wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes. Ideally, you will want to back up all these files. Possibly, you may have other subdirectories. Back these up as well. The way this works best for me is to always have a mirror copy of everything my host has. Make a change in one, download the changed file so that the two sets of files always match. In case you’re curious, I use Filezilla as my FTP client. It’s open source and simple to use.

(If you have no idea what FTP is, leave a comment and that can maybe be a future post.)

That pretty much covers the backup side. If you have these two pieces, you are safe. If your host goes kaput, you can be back up relatively quickly with all your posts and comments intact. Perhaps in a future post, I’ll cover restoring. It’s tricky, but doable.

Good luck.