March 2008

How to back up your WordPress DB?

by Sujoy on March 21, 2008

WordpressIt is quite essential to regularly back up your blog data. More so when you are hit with a bad weather in your servers. That is when you see the whole world crumbling down. Imagine me, when my servers crashed and I had no access to the c-panel and neither could I ftp to the servers as well. And yes, I was without a single back up of my more than 30 posts on Techkeyla, and another 50 I believe on OneKnightStands. That’s when you actually start re-reading your posts, in a state of hallucination that is. So to avoid such levels of trauma in the blogging world, back up is a must.

Now there are quite a bit of plugins in WordPress which offer similar features and facilities. I found this one to be quite simple to use, very fast and with all the necessary tools needed. It is called , shockingly WordPress backup, and the link is here. http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

How to install: Download the zp file from going to the link here. Extract the zip file to a local folder and have the php file uploaded in your plugins folder of your wordpress folder. It should be inside :wp-content.
Now once it is uploaded, go to your WordPress admin console and go to the plugins tab. Hit Activate to activate the plugin and voila, job is done, but not yet. Next is to actually back up your DB. So, go to Manage–> Backup.
It should now show you a page with Backup options as to where you want to back up. The options are – On the server in a folder, download it to your local machine, or email it to a specified address.
Besides these, you can also set the Scheduled Backup. Most of us have daily posts, so an hourly backup doesn’t make much sense.A weekly backup also might face the risk of running behind a couple of posts. To be noted: You need to give write permissions for wp-content folder to enable Back Up files to be saved.
P.S. Do a manual back up once in a while, just to make sure that your data doesn’t vanish if your auto-backups fail.

Tip of the Day: If you have a Gmail ID, which I believe all of us do, set the filter for the given mails sent as backup attachments and you’ll have an arranged inbox of your backups. And the backup files are in a gun zipped SQL, and have convenient naming conventions and their date of backup can be easily identified . Happy Blogging!

Thanks to Brajeshwar for all the help in backing up my blogs.
Pics Courtesy:Jbiljr

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Links for 2008-03-20

by Sujoy on March 20, 2008

Throughout my blogging experience so far, what I’ve learnt the most is how important social networking online can actually be. The benefits of social networking through online communities, emails, and of course through your own blog/website can actually boost or even magnify your gains as well as popularity. So here I am , for the first time introducing a new category of posts which will be a collection of the best posts that I read in a day, and to which I’d link to, so that you people who read my small blog can also get to know these wonderful posts. Not a bad idea huh!! Hopefully, sometime I might get back the linking love. But for now, here’s what I’ve got for the day. (Oh yes, this is going to be a daily affair.)

PC World’s post on Google easter bunnies 

Ars Technica: Unlimited iTunes bundled with iPods

Macrumors: Time Machine works with Airport Extreme USB

2nd Day Blog: Nokia releases black N82

Android guys:Google Plans  new developer event

Online Inspiration: How to be invisible in Gmail Chat

Techdune: USB Light Show

That’s it for the day. Shall be back with more.

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Youtube is now More OPEN

by Sujoy on March 12, 2008

Youtube

Youtube today announced a new set of more Open API’s which will enable users to use,upload and share Youtube’s huge repository of videos from almost anywhere and everywhere. Youtube indeed is unstoppable, unputdownable and invincible when it comes to Video sharing. This is what Jim Pattersen had to say :

We try really hard to make YouTube as open as possible. Anyone can upload and view videos, which can be embedded anywhere and viewed on all kinds of different devices. And, of course, anyone can participate in our community by commenting on videos, rating them, and sharing them with friends.

Nevertheless, we worried that we weren’t open enough. So, we pulled some all-nighters and added some powerful new ways to integrate YouTube content and community into other websites, desktop applications, video games, mobile devices, televisions, cameras, and lots more.

For users, the exciting news is that they will be able to actively participate in the YouTube community from just about anywhere, including the online destinations and web communities they already love and visit regularly. For partners and developers, YouTube has grown into much more than a website. It has become an open, general purpose, video services platform, available for use by just about any third-party website, desktop application, or consumer device. We now provide a complete set of (CRUD) capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube “cloud,” managed by us. We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It’s all free, and it’s available to everyone, starting now.

Technically, we have introduced some new APIs. (This is just a geeky acronym for Awesomely Powerful Interactions, which is what users are now capable of performing from just about anywhere.) Building upon our existing APIs for querying the YouTube library and playing embedded YouTube videos, we have added the following new API services for external developers and partners:

  • Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
  • Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
  • Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
  • Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
  • Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

The number of possible new applications is endless. Electronic Arts has enabled gamers to capture videos of fantastical user-generated creatures from their upcoming game, Spore, and publish these directly into YouTube. The University of California, Berkeley is bringing free educational content to the world, enhancing their open source lecture capture and delivery system to publish videos automatically into YouTube. Animoto enables its users to create personalized, professional-quality music videos from their own photos and upload them directly to YouTube. Tivo is providing its users a rich and highly participative YouTube viewing experience on the television. For more details about the innovative ways these other partners are utilizing YouTube APIs, see our case studies.

What will you build with our new APIs? The possibilities are endless. Learn more about the exciting new features in this release from our engineers or visit Google Code to get started now. We can’t wait to see what you create.

Here’s to a new future of Video Sharing- CHEERS to YouTube.

Related Posts:Techcrunch

Image Courtesy:battletopsman

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Yahoo joins Opensocial League

by Sujoy on March 12, 2008

Yahoo Opensocial

Remember the thing called Opensocial that Google came up with when rival Facebook’s fraction of a fraction was bought by Microsoft, making them worth 15 billion $. But that’s like ages ago. The current buzz is that Yahoo, which was about to be acquired by Microsoft, is now joining forces with the Opensocial Alliance. According to NY Times, Yahoo is considering to join the alliance which will enable it to create more tools and services which will work across many platforms. The Opensocial gang as of now consists of Google, Friendster, hi5,Ning, MySpace Orkut,Xing and many others. If Yahoo joins, that would make Facebook the odd one out. Clearly, if Facebook continues to go independent with their own API, and the rest of the entire Web 2.0 following Opensocial’s API, it would not be long for facebook to eithr face its doom. But then, World’s youngest billionaire – Mark Zuckenberg isn’t that dumb, yeah? If Yahoo for sure joins Opensocial, Facebook might get forced to switch to Opensocial API for its applications. Finally, we might get to see a uniform distribution of API for application developers. Yippee!!

Related Post:Yahoo Plans to Join OpenSocial Alliance?

Image Courtesy:Thomas Hawk

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