Weblog Tools Collection reviewed WordPress Filter, a plugin I wrote. I think they may have done a better job explaining the plugin then I typically do.
Picture of the Day
March 21, 2009
Atticus is tired apparently
This post is part of the Picture of the Day Series for 2009.
WordPress Backups
March 20, 2009
Backing up your site is something that is very important to do. You never know when you might make a change that you need to revert, or you install a plugin that goes haywire harming your site. A reliable backup routine that is put into practice early and often is always a good idea. I authored a post on backups over at WordPress Easily that I thought folks might find useful even outside of that services’ context, so I’ve decided to convert it here as a more all-purpose backup strategy.
Many web hosts have backup plans in place. However they are usually more focused on protecting the server from a catastrophic failure then they are about being able to restore a backup because a piece of software you installed messed up your account. In general, it’s best to never rely on your web host to have you taken care of where backups are concerned. What if they go out of business? What if they have a catastrophic failure that’s so bad even their backup plan can’t recover from it? What if you just want to change web hosts?
So that leaves the question, what can you do for your WordPress site? Well, there are many tools out there to help with this. The first, and easiest, is using WordPress’s built in XML export of data. This will get all of your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. If you ever have to restore your site from it, it’s as easy as using the built in XML import. Unfortunately it does potentially leave out some data.
Some plugins store their data in their own database tables, which won’t be included in the XML Export. To get that data backed up, you may want to consider using something like the WP-DB-Backup plugin. It can create a SQL Dump of your entire WordPress database, including table structures and data. If you ever need to restore from that you’ll want to make sure that you have access to a tool like phpMyAdmin with your web host, or the plugin mentioned in the final option below. You’ll need to be able to execute queries directly against your database to restore from it.
A final option, and probably the most advanced, is you can use WP-phpMyAdmin. This gives you a copy of phpMyAdmin within your WordPress administration panel. You can export your database from this (which will create a SQL Dump file just like WP-DB-Backup), then if you ever need to restore, you can use WP-phpMyAdmin to import your database. I wouldn’t recommend WP-phpMyAdmin unless you’re fairly comfortable working with SQL Databases. But if you have a SQL Dump of your WordPress database, chances are whichever host you are using, they’ll have a method to let you restore it.
All of that takes care of your database and most of your content, but what about your themes, documents, plugins, etc? You can use an FTP program to download your site to your local computer. You probably don’t even need to do the entire site. If you download your /wp-content/ directory that should take care of anything you need since that is where your themes and plugins are stored, as well as any files you upload from within the WordPress administration area.
As I said, it’s recommended that you get a backup plan in place early and that you practice it often. You never know when you’ll need that backup. It could be never, or it could be tomorrow.
Richmond Wiki
March 14, 2009
In case you’ve missed it, there is a Richmond Wiki created by Andrew Miller. It’s become a pretty great site to find out about all things Richmond from dog parks to disc golf courses to places to get free stuff on your birthday. There’s even a wiki article on MattWalters.net over there along with WordCamp RVA.
Check it out if you haven’t already.
Webhosting Advice
March 3, 2009
Webhosting is something I am frequently asked about. I’ve had a site hosted in some fashion since the late 90’s, so dealing with the in’s and out’s of hosting is something I’ve become quite familiar with. These days I’ve even moved towards configuring my own servers to host my sites. But this article isn’t going to get into that side of things.
I decided it was time that I finally chronicle what I’ve learned over the years and what my current setup is along with the reasons I like it how it is. To the average user, my setup might seem complex, but even if you only put a couple of these practices to work, I think you’ll find yourself well on the way to having a pleasant experience.
I practice a fairly modular setup for my array of websites and it has its benefits. By splitting things up I can get the most bang for the buck by putting critical systems on providers that provide mission critical support, and other things on more inexpensive solutions (yes, even in hosting you largely get what you pay for).
Moving on to my recommended setup:
Registering your domain
This is the first step in setting up a website for yourself. I highly recommend eNom.com as a registrar. I’ve been using them for nearly 5 years now and they’re a pretty solid registrar. Even if you have already registered your domain somewhere else, I’d recommend considering a transfer of your domain to eNom.
The main reason I like eNom as a registrar is the free DNS hosting, which is crucial to my setup. However, in general they’re a good registrar. Their prices are competitive, managing your domain is easy with their web interface, and they aren’t always trying to push additional services on you. Don’t get me wrong, additional services are there but they don’t shove them on you.
Allowing them to host my DNS is the linchpin of my setup. Many webhosts ask you to set the DNS servers for your domain to theirs. Unfortunately changing nameservers is still a drawn out process, sometimes taking up to 24-48 hours to complete. Compounding the issue, many times you can’t setup the DNS records on your new nameservers until the domain servers have changed. This can mean even more hours, potentially of downtime, for your site. Since my DNS is with eNom, if I change webhosts or email providers, I can just update the zonefile for my domain and usually within an hour or two everything has changed over.
If you REALLY like your current registrar, then you can look into other third party DNS hosting services that will still allow you the benefits I’ll be describing below. I just happen to prefer eNom.
Choosing an email provider
Many folks will choose to host their email with their current webhost. That’s fine, but I’d argue there are other solutions, better solutions, available to you. The one I use is GMail. Google’s interface for GMail is pretty top notch and the fact that you can get Google Apps for your domain for free, why not choose them? Their downtime is extremely low, and you can use the web interface when you’re not around your computer. If you do like the feel of a desktop client though, you can still access your email via IMAP or POP3.
Google Apps is also a scalable solution. You can start off on the free version and add up to 50 users on your domain. If you outgrow 50 users, or you start running into storage concerns with your archived email you can always convert to the paid version at $50 per year per user. That’s really not that bad of an option unless you have a spare exchange server sitting around (but really, if you have that kind of infrastructure already in place why aren’t you just hosting your own website?).
Also, by sourcing your email to a third party like this you also ease transitioning between webhosts should you ever need to. Since your DNS is hosted by a central party, you never have to change your MX records (the DNS settings that tell your email where to go) when you change your website from one host to another. This means no concerns over some email getting left on your old host, or losing emails in the transition, etc.
See how hosting your DNS on your own is starting to fit together in the plan?
Choosing a webhost
This is probably where 90% of my friends that have problems make their mistake. Webhosting is a low margin business. They make their money by hosting as many people on as few servers as possible. The sheer number of competitors in the industry make it almost problematic. You have everyone from high school (maybe even middle school these days) kids that buy a reseller account with a webhost and then offer plans at $1.99/mo, promising 99.999% uptime and unlimited disk space/bandwidth. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there are folks offering webhosting for $50/mo and you don’t necessarily get $50 of service per month.
Let me be clear, you do not want to host with someone promising unlimited services and extremely high uptime guarantees. If they’re an industry giant, like Yahoo perhaps, you will probably be fine but there will usually be catches involved in the plan. There are a couple things you should be aware of though between the those two possible scenarios.
Scenario 1 – The fly by nighter
In this case, you’re definitely in trouble. They’ll soon get bored, or start wondering why they aren’t making any money and chances are they’ll just shut the server down, leaving you without access to your website (possibly email), etc. It could take you days to recover. The whole time your website is down. Don’t even get me started on how these folks tend to like advertising 99.999% uptime. They often have trouble achieving 80% uptime.
Scenario 2 – The industry giant
You’re in a slightly better situation here, but keep in mind these companies are in it to make money. Usually the small print of those agreements you’re making during sign up include text saying that if you start to use too much disk space, bandwidth, or processor time, they have the right to shut your site down. They’ll put up all kinds of walls to keep you from actually storing terabytes of data on their servers. They can’t make money on you if they do allow it. If you plan on using reasonable resources though, you’re probably fine, but an industry giant selling unlimited disk space, etc, likely isn’t going to do that for $1.99/mo.
So if your website is even the least bit important to you, I recommend you plan on spending around $10-$20 per month on your hosting. You can find some rock solid providers in that price range and it’s really not that expensive.
As for my personal hosting plans, I currently have plans with two separate providers, but that’s not something the average user is going to need.
My primary hosting plan is a (dv) server with Media Temple. It hosts mattwalters.net and SnipIt.me along with some other small sites I have setup mainly for testing purposes.
My other hosting plan is with slicehost. This plan is where WordPressEasily.com and its hosted blogs reside. WordPress Easily is quite the complicated setup though. The nature of the service dictates needing to be able to bring new servers online quickly or swap out servers, etc.
Just to finish tying in the modular concept, by having all 3 of these services sourced to different providers, it leaves me in an agile position. If I need to move to a different webhost for some reason, I can easily change the DNS records for my domain and have my site moved over quickly. Or if I need to point a subdomain to a different server for whatever reason, it’s a quick change. Same goes for email, if I wanted to change to a different provider, I could do so without affecting my websites. Really, the only catch to this setup is I can’t easily change registrars ;)
Hope you’ve found this informative and maybe even taken away something good from it. If you have any tips you’d like to share, by all means feel free to do so in the comments :)
SnipIt.me
March 3, 2009
This past weekend was pretty busy development wise. First I launched WordPressEasily.com. I also put together SnipIt.me. SnipIt.me is basically a sharing service of various sorts, URL Shortening, Image Sharing, and Code Sharing.
The URL Shortening is pretty standard. You can put in a long URL, and it makes it into a smaller URL for pasting in things like Twitter, Email, whatever. It gives you the option of just one URL that just automatically redirects the user you send it to and another option that will show the URL to the user so they can see where you’re about to send them.
Image sharing is pretty simple. You can upload a small image (less then 1MB) and it gives you a nice short URL to send to someone, that once visited, displays your image. The service hosts the image for you :)
Code Sharing is pretty spiffy. You can paste in a block of code, or an entire file, then choose the language it was written in and it gives you a nice short URL you can send to someone. Once the visitor goes to the URL the code is displayed with syntax highlighting (syntax highlighting provided by Alex’s Syntax Highlighter).
The goal of the site over all is to be very minimalistic. It’s focusing on doing its job and doing it well, not bells and whistles. That pretty much shows through in the interface (it takes minimalism seriously). It’s not that there aren’t other services that do these things, but none of them really did all 3 items, and they mostly had small things I didn’t like. For instance, most of the syntax highlighting services put the code in a small column that forces you to scroll left and right even for small pieces of code. This is not the case with SnipIt.me. It uses the full width of the browser window to display the code.
Anyhow, hopefully you can find a use for the service. I’m constantly trying to enhance it in little ways while staying true to it being minimalistic. Let me know if you have any ideas for the service :)
Picture of the Day
March 2, 2009
Well, it definitely snowed last night. There are more images on flickr.
This post is part of the Picture of the Day Series for 2009.
WordPress Easily
March 1, 2009
So over the weekend I quietly launched WordPressEasily.com. Basically it’s a WordPress hosting solution where the system takes care of installing the latest version of WordPress, setting up the database, getting permissions straight and all that good stuff. It also takes care of pre-configuring some of the harder to setup plugins (like WP Super Cache). When you sign up for an account with WordPress Easily, that’s all taken care of for you.
The advantage to using a service like this vs. some of the other WordPress solutions is that you’re getting your very own copy of WordPress. You get to decide what themes and plugins are available to you. You can even design your own theme from the ground up or install any theme you can find on the internet.
So if you’re thinking about setting up a blog, or if you already have a blog but want more control over it, check out WordPressEasily.com. You get all the benefits of a self install without having to worry about securing the system, database connections, or file permissions. All of this for $5/mo.
I am a Web Developer located in Richmond, VA. Primarily, I work on the back-end of websites utilizing my database and desktop application coding experience from the past to achieve desired results for the user interface. Recently however I have started moving more into the UI realm, utilizing JavaScript and AJAX to allow for better performance out of the back-end systems.