There’s been quite a few requests for a tutorial to backup a website or blog. So I’m going to do a 3 part series this week covering:

1. Backing up files and folders
2. Backing up database
3. Reversing a WordPress upgrade

You may wonder at the third one. It does seem like an odd topic and not related to website backups but it is very relevant because in order to revert to an older version of WordPress, you will need to begin with backups and the method of backup we will show you in this series will make it a whole lot easier to restore a failed WordPress upgrade.

In this tutorial, we will be demonstrating the backup and restore using cPanel because that’s what we use and that’s what we like. There are many ways to do a backup. There are also plugins to help you and make it all automatic and easy. This tutorial will show the manual (and free) way because… let’s just say, I’m the type who believes that you should know how to light a candle or a lamp if your power goes off.

Now we’re ready, let’s go! [Read more...]

People ask all the time, “How to you come up with something interesting and fresh to write on your blog?” my answer often contains a long list of methods, one of which is to open up Google Reader and see what others are writing about and if something there inspires me. It very often does the trick.

The only problem with that is, sometimes I am not necessarily in writing mode but am in topic research mode so I tend to feed all this into Evernote and go back to write them later. I know some of you would much rather save those interesting posts directly into your WordPress blog so you will be less distracted with more new and interesting posts when you are finally ready to sit and write.

Using The ‘Send To’ feature in Google Reader, you can do that. Here’s a quick tutorial. [Read more...]

Amazon S3 is a great way to store and distribute files. In particular large media files that could suck your web hosting bandwidth quickly if you uploaded to your own web site. And S3 is very, very affordable.

A question that comes up regularly is when people start storing files exclusively for members on Amazon S3.

You see, in order for others to download a file you uploaded to Amazon S3, you have to make the file accessible to everyone. And everyone means – everyone on the Internet.

In a membership site setting, that may not be what you want. The good part is, Amazon S3 already has a way to allow authenticated downloads. I won’t get too technical here but it basically involves making sure the URL people are clicking through from includes a special ‘key’. This takes a little bit of coding but if you are using WordPress, there’s a wonderful little (and free) plugin that does the job beautifully. [Read more...]