blogging

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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To Do List for Setting Up your Blog

by Sujoy on January 4, 2008

just blog it The journey from being a Hello World page to the Page you see now hasn’t been quite smooth, thanks to me being unprepared, and of course being spoilt by the drag n drop of Blogger Template. So to not repeat the same mistake, here I have prepared a To-Do List to make your Blog as beautiful as mine (if you consider it to be). As in “How to go for the default page to having a fully functional Blog page”. I presume you have your domain, you’ve hosted it and got your WordPress already installed properly. In short you can see the default Hello World page on your Homepage with the Blue Header (Read the WordPress official installation page if you at all are having problems knowing how to do so, or just type your question on that blank space known as the Google Search ). Let’s take it from here then, shall we?

To-Do List for Setting Up your Blog (From Hello World to Wassup World).:-

Being unprepared is not at all an option if you want your Blog to succeed. Success here means traffic, people visiting your Blog regularly, Subscribing to your feeds, may be clicking your ads even, but above all reading your posts and commenting on them. So you do not want your blog to look like a shabby, crumpled, torn newspaper column. I have literally read almost a 100 “How To”s over the last few days, to have come up with this list . Here we go!

  1. Selecting the Right Theme:-

Unless you are a CSS wizard, this one comes directly from the huge repository of free WordPress templates available online. I chose a suitable theme from wpthemesfree.com and there is just more than one to fit your need.All you need is to look around, sit,decide and finalise on the theme and of course make your own changes to fit your purpose. Important points to be noted are whether you need a two column or a three column theme, what should be the entire theme color, and most importantly the text font size. All these small things go a long way in enhancing the user experience. Template editing is of course possible, with the usual trial and error procedure. [Continue Reading]

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Techkeyla–Hot in 2007

by Sujoy on January 3, 2008

hot techkeyla2007 has been a year like never before for the world of Technology and Internet, abuzz with so much to talk about, so much to debate upon, so many doubts to be clarified and so many rumors and speculations made. I was lucky enough to cover a few of these topics and hot news on my previous blog. In my three odd months of blogging for Techkeyla so far, I wrote on topics ranging from Facebook’s “is” in status message being (not) removed to Google’s Opensocial Project to Mixx to Tech rumors floating around to even some random lists generated by my alter-ego. Surprisingly enough, people dug them and even replied to me with their comments. Based on the number of comments, MyBlogLog’s record of visits for each topic, here I have compiled a top 10 list (yeah, yet another one) of the Hot Posts of Techkeyla for 2007. So, here they are:-

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