If you’re depend solely on your web host to do your daily backups, you are risking your web site’s very existence. Most web hosts only keep your web site backups for a day. This practice seems fine most of the time. What I am afraid of is when an inept web host that does not discover a problem with their web server within 24 hours of your last working web site backup. When they finally discover the problem, they may only be able to restore a corrupt web site backup because of their daily backup policy. An event like this may destroy your web site if you do not backup your web site files to your own computer or to a remote server.

This happened to me more than once and lucky for me I do daily MySQL database backups and FTP synchronization backups. I have tested a lot of MySQL database backup scripts and I found mySqlDump Database Backup to work best for me. I use multiple Cron jobs to schedule all my database backups. The output of the script is a “gz” file, which is similar to a zip file. I had to edit the source code of this script to prevent it from deleting the previous day’s backups.

Now that I have daily backups of my databases on my web server, I run FTP Voyager every night to download all the database backup files to my computer. FTP Voyager has a scheduler program that allows me to specify which folders of my web site I would like to synchronize with the folders on my computer. I usually select the “upload folders” and database backup folders to be synchronized to get the latest files uploaded by my visitors or myself downloaded to my computer.

You may use other tools to get the job done but I highly recommend a more sophisticated FTP program like FTP Voyager because it allows you to schedule downloads. Setting this daily backup regime may take some work but it may very well save your web site and your business.

Tagged As: database-backup, FTP-Voyager, MySQL

Categories: Web Development | 3 Comments »

It’s been some time since my last post. I am ready to resume blogging again after a long break. I got rid of a lot of “bad investments” to pave the way for a better year ahead. About one year ago, I updated my blog template and plugins. This year, my blog just got better with some really useful plugins I recently discovered.

1. Similar Posts

There was an older version of this plugin created by someone else. The author of “Similar Posts” upgraded the older version and it is much better and easier to install than the previous one. You will see a list of similar posts on every one of my blog posts.

2. Subscribe To Comments

Sometimes a particular blog post can become a popular talking point for a lot of people. This plugin makes it easy for someone to keep updated on all the latest follow up comments via email.

3. Math Comment Spam Protection

I get loads of comment spam every week. The default anti spam plugin “Akismet” does a fairly good job of filtering comment spam but sometimes a few of them manage to sneak through the filters. This plugin forces the spammer to enter a simple math sum into a text field before his comment will be posted. This isn’t perfect but it surely will stop most “auto spam” software.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Previously I did not receive a lot of trackback spam. I don’t even know how it works but this plugin makes sure the person blogging about something on your blog does include a link back to the exact post or your web site.

5. Social Bookmark Creator

I used to have a row of cute little icons after each blog post for people to add my posts to their social bookmark accouts. I found this plugin neater because it displays the bookmark urls in a drop down menu instead. I don’t like the loading times of the icons and not everyone recognizes the logos of the social bookmarks sites they use. This one is simpler and more functional in my opinion.

6. Ultimate Tag Warrior

I looked high and low and this is the best tagging plugin I could find on the internet. What I have implemented on my blog is only a fraction of what this plugin can do. You may also display “tag clouds” and “tag pages” for your blog.

7. Another WordPress Meta Plugin

I think the name of this plugin sounds rather silly but it works very well. I discovered that this plugin conflicts with the old “Adhesive 3.2″ plugin so if you plan to use this plugin, you need to disable “Adhesive 3.2″. Now I can add a default meta keyword and description tag for my entire blog or tags specific to each blog post only.

8. Feedburner Feed Replacement

If I could restart me blog with what I now know, I would have used FeedBurner from the start. I redirect my WordPress feed to FeedBurner. I even turn off the ping URLs in my WordPress settings because I use FeedBurner’s “PingShot” pinging service now.

9. Feed Control

My blog feed now includes my WordPress pages thanks to this plugin. I personally make use of WordPress pages in my blog. Not many people do that but I think it is necessary to separate blog content and non-blog content.

10. Filosofo Home-Page Control

This plugin lets you select a WordPress page to replace the default blog post front page. Great for turning WordPress into a regular web site instead of a blog.

11. My Page Order

This is must have plugin if you use pages and you want them to be sorted by ID. The default interface is not very good for mass updating your page IDs. You can edit your template code to sort by page titles too but this ones let’s you sort your pages by IDs in your customized order.

12. Google Sitemaps

No WordPress blog should go without this plugin. It does not make sense to use a WordPress blog and use another script or software to generate the XML sitemap for your blog. There is also a free Yahoo sitemap script that lets you generate a Yahoo-friendly text file with all the links in your blog for their new “Site Explorer” service. Remember to rename the text file to “urllist.txt” to get it to work with Yahoo.

13. Smart Archives

This plugin builds on the WordPress tag functions to create a better archive of your blog posts. Check out my archives to see how it looks like.

14. monthchunks

This plugin displays the links to the monthly blog archives of your blogs. The default list by WordPress displays them in a long list with one month per line. This one shortens it to a neat and compact list instead. Great for blogs that have a few years worth of posts.

15. wordTube

Not too long ago some internet marketing gurus were selling these video products like hotcakes. Did you know there are free video players you could use for your web site? I should cover this in greater detail in the future. You will need to download the recommended mp3 and flash video player for this to work. It even includes “Media Center” area to store all your media files.

16. WP-ContactForm

When I started this blog, I simply displayed my email on a contact page with a “spam proof” script. It did not work very well. My original email vincent at vincentrich.com was infested with spam so I had to delete it to stop wasting time deleting them. With this plugin, you will only know my email address if I reply. It makes the sorting of emails easier because you may edit the subject line to whatever you want.

These are all the plugins I use at the moment. If you have a plugin that you find very useful for WordPress, leave a comment and let us know. It would be a great time to test these plugins on my blog to see if you would like them on your blog.

Tagged As: Blogging, comment+spam, feedburner, flv, plugins, rss, seo, social+bookmarks, trackback+spam, wordpress

Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | 3 Comments »

I recently deleted all my html files from my web site. I created WordPress pages instead. I find its easier to edit my pages with the WordPress 2.0 built in WYWISWG html editor rather than editing it with Dreamweaver and uploading the html files to my web server.

WordPress uses Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality to create pages. There are 2 types of pages as I call it. There are blog posts and pages. WordPress pages are not part of the blog archives. I customize the “permalink” of the blog posts to end with a “.html” filename. The cool thing is WordPress doesn’t actually creatre a real html file, it is simply telling the Apache web server that anytime someone requests for a html file, redirect that request to a php file that pulls data from the database. Too bad I haven’t found a way to create html files with the WordPress pages. I can do it with the blog posts by changing the “permalink” options.

How to create “page sections” and pages in WordPress?

Try clicking on any of my “About Me” section pages and you will see that it looks like there are files in the “/about/” folder. I did this by first creating a WordPress page with the page slug “about” and set my other pages to link to this “about” page as its page parent. That’s all!

What do I do about my existing HTML files?

I had 1 major concern when I was removing my html files. What if someone clicks on a link in the search engines for one of my html pages? Wouldn’t that bring them to a broken page on my site?

No worries! Simply use the Apache’s “301 redirect” to redirect my html pages to my new WordPress pages. WordPress uses the “.htaccess” file in the same folder as your WordPress installation to handle these redirect requests. Check out the screenshot on the left. Simply add the 301 redirect code below the existing WordPress code in the “.htaccess” file and its done!

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | 3 Comments »

I visited ShrinkMyLink.com today and here’s a snippet of the message left by their CEO.

"On November 5th our entire network was temporarily taken offline for over 8 hours because a ShrinkMyLink user has posted a link to an illegal and very offensive website.

For several hours we were working with the FBI and our upstream providers to ensure that the relevant information pertaining to this criminal activity was successfully extracted, archived and secured. Unfortunately, due to government policies and the importance of preserving the evidence intact, our servers had to be temporarily disconnected from the Internet.

As you can imagine, this outage — while completely out of our control — has cost us thousands of dollars in lost revenue, not to mention losses that cannot be interpreted monetarily (i.e. our customers’ confidence, frustration of their users)."

I feel its better to pay money to have your own redirection service with cheap web hosting a few free scripts.

Categories: Web Development | No Comments »

I recommended Shrink My Link in September in this post of mine. But it seems like they have folded in the past few days or something. I grew very dependent on their service for cloaking my affiliate links on my blog and Google AdWords. Lucky for me, I was left with 1 affiliate program on Google AdWords with a Shrink My Link cloaked URL. But I still lost 1 day’s worth of sales on my Survey campaign!

I believe it would be better to purchase a cheap web host service and install a split tester script and an affiliate cloaking script to store my affiliate links. I would need a generic URL like link.com or something more specific to a particular niche like SurveyWebSite.com. This could then be used for Overture PPC listings.

You may test out one of my new cloacked affiliate links of Google AdWords 1 2 3. Its hidden in a frame with an encrypted URL link. You won’t even see the Clickbank “?hop=myusername” code on the URL!

Categories: Web Development | No Comments »