Maintaining Your (Michigan web site) Blog CHAPTER 1 8
Maintaining Your Blog CHAPTER 1 8 You need to do some regular housekeeping if you are to maintain a working, active community web site. Some of those housekeeping tasks are standard things you should do for any kind of web site: making backups, checking your links, and so on. Some things are WordPressspecific, and some of them are specific to maintaining your readers interest. None of these maintenance tasks are particularly daunting, and most of them should occupy no more than a few hours a week. Your biggest maintenance time should be spent feeding your blog: responding to comments, writing new posts, and adding links. In this chapter, I will show you how to look after your blog, beginning with the most important maintenance task: backing up your database. Backing Up and Restoring Your Database Why should I make a backup? you may ask yourself. The answer can be found by imagining having to ask yourself Why didn t I make a backup? when it all goes wrong. You never want to be in the situation where you regret not making a backup. The procrastinator in us will put off generating a backup countless times until it s too late. And that s just the one backup, not an ongoing weekly regime. Those of you who have been on the receiving end of a disk crash, a software update that went wrong, or even an Internet service provider going out of business will have learned the hard way, by having your whole cyber-existence wiped out seemingly at the touch of a button. Never again will you let yourself be placed in such a disastrous situation. It has happened to me more than once. Now I think hard about a disaster recovery plan even before I start on a new project. Even as I write this chapter, I find myself pressing Ctrl+S to save the document at the end of each line. The primary considerations of a good backup strategy are that a backup should be easy to do, should rely as little on human interaction as possible (hence making it easy), and should be performed regularly. Oh, and of course, because there isn t much point in generating a lot of backups without being able to restore them when something does go wrong, a good backup strategy is only as good as its recovery plan. You have a few choices when deciding how to back up WordPress databases. You can use phpMyAdmin or the MySQL Administrator application, which you may have used to create the databases. You can use the command-line interface to MySQL if you have remote access to your server. Finally, you can use the WordPress backup plug-in from Skippy.net, which is the approach I ll describe here.
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