Posts Tagged ‘blog’
How to back up your blog and everything else
July 31, 2010 | 
Author Backing up is one of the most important maintenance jobs you need to do regularly with your blog and your computer. A backup service needs to offer sufficient space, sufficient bandwidth and an idiot proof back up tool. Back ups are too important to leave to chance or try and manage with complicated tools that need to be checked constantly. I want a set and forget tool that backs up all my files without me having to worry that it is getting on with it but that also notifies me each time and it has done something so I know it is working without having to remember to check.
Being a Virgin Media customer I have access to the free Vstuff. Unfortunately you get what you pay for with this software as it is appalling. It is slow, unreliable and takes ages to back up your files. Other users have reported that files are going missing and multiple versions of the same files are being uploaded endlessly. Vstuffed more than Vstuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy answer that would let you back up all your blogs and all your computers, macs and pcs alike that works easily and reliably. Well funnily enough… there is.
Idrive is a back up tool from http://www.idrive.com. They have both mac and pc versions and a plug in for wordpress. There are several levels of service available – a free 2GB back up space, a paid single machine account and the the one I have – the family pack. The family pack offers 500GB of backup space for up to 5 machines. This is ideal for most people and at just under $15 a month it is competitive to other back up services such as dropbox. It can be bit slow on my old tiger machine but on the more recent leopard one it is fine. Compared to Vstuff it is a cheetach as opposed to a 3 legged tortoise with a limp.
The best bit about Idrive is the new Idrive plugin for wordpress. This makes sure that all your files and the database are backed up regularly. It defaults to daily backups and is intelligent enough to backup only the files that have changed. It also dumps the contents of the database too so you have a complete snapshot of your blog which should make it easy to restore should the worst happen.
Luckily the worst hasn’t happened so I haven’t had to test out the restore capabilities beyond doing a quick check…
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WPBook – make your blog appear on Facebook!
Do you want to increase the readership of your blog? Finding a way to promote within Facebook and your current network is a good way of doing just this. There is a great plugin called WPBook which allows you to connect your normal wordpress blog in such a way that it appears as regular Facebook content so you can easily share it with friends and gain fans. The adage in social media at the moment is ‘go where the people are’ and virtually everyone is on Facebook. Twitter is ok for blog promotion but it is great to find a way of having your blog appear to be within your network rather than external to it.
To set it up, the best way is to follow the ‘detailed’ instructions available with the plugin. In essence you want to create an application with Facebook first. Then you fill in the API keys and page name of the application within the plugin settings. Then you have to allow the plugin access to your profile and the application. This is the trickier bit. If you don’t get the right page name and profile id it won’t work. If you have the initial settings incorrect then the granting permissions part will not work properly so you won’t be able to find out the information you need as Facebook tends to throw you back a blank page. Some diagnostics would be useful here as if you are new to this then you are going to be scratching around trying to work out just where you have made a mistake.
It took me an hour or two after installing the plugin. Had I noticed the link to the ‘detailed’ instructions first I think I would have managed it much more quickly. But I played around with a few settings and found out several ways it wouldn’t work 
Considering I had never built a Facebook application before this evening or even registered as a Developer it is quite amazing what you can do with only a small amount of knowledge.
