Blog Exercises: Backups and Alternatives

I didn’t expect to return home after a meeting this morning to find I have no telephone or Internet access on this bright sunshine, calm weather May day. I’ve got classes to prep for, sites to review for students and clients, article deadlines, these blog exercises to publish and keep to my year long commitment, […]

WordPress.com Maintenance Downtime on Sunday, February 15, 2009

WordPress.com warns that the free blog hosting service will be down for maintenance starting Sunday, February 15, 2009, at 20:00 GMT (noon PST, 3PM EST) for maintenance and upgrade improvements. This should only be a few seconds to a couple minutes. This does not impact full version and self-hosted versions of WordPress. The maintenance probably […]

Annual Reminder (and some options) to Backup Your WordPress Blog

Having suffered from numerous computer crashes and server breakdowns, in spite of their promises, trust me when I say you need to make backing up your WordPress blog a part of your regularly scheduled maintenance and housekeeping. Futurosity offers “8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others)”, an interesting compilation of tips to help […]

Backing Up Your WordPress.com Blog

A lot of people have been worrying about how to backup their WordPress.com blog. While WordPress.com has daily server backups, you might want to keep your own backup copy of your blog. UPDATE WordPress.com bloggers can now backup their WordPress.com blogs through the Export panel. Export your WordPress.com blog as an XML file for easy […]

A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users

I get a lot of questions about the tags I use at the bottom of most of my posts. I used to feature two sets of tags, one for Technorati tags and the other as navigation tags to search my site. Up until recently, these were created from a text file I kept open all […]

WOW! Image Browsing and Uploading Feature on wordpress.com

This applies to the 2005 version of WordPress and WordPress.com. Owen Winkler, plugin author of Exhibit Preview has been working on an addition to the next version of WordPress to improve access, uploading, and viewing of images within the WordPress Write Post administration panel, as has Andy Skelton. Well, whether they are working alone or […]

Backing Up WordPress

UPDATED The recent challenges of dealing with Hurricane Katrina brought up the issue of bank security and record keeping. While many banks were destroyed and access to people’s money and accounts were limited temporarily, their money is still secure. Banks are required to backup all their information and store it offsite. One bank was described […]

Site Map

Site Directory Feeds Full Site Feed WordPress News Category Feed WordPress Tips Category Feed Blog Babble Category Feed Web Wise Category Feed Comments Only TechCrunch: Review of Online, Web-based Feed Readers Site Search Tag List The following are the most commonly used keywords and phrases to search this site. Click on the tag to generate […]

WordPress 3.4 Green is Good to Go

WordPress 3.4 is out, named “Green” in honor of jazz guitarist and composer Grant Green. Green is a great nickname for this hot release of WordPress, bringing with it some excellent new features and improvements. As with all WordPress upgrades, it is recommended you backup your full WordPress site, database and all files, before upgrading. […]

201 WordPress Books

As part of my project to bring WordPress into colleges nationally, I did a quick survey of how many books have been published about WordPress. I was asked by several major publishers to publish the first book in English on WordPress but had to decline due to my traveling schedule and work load, so it’s […]

What are the Essential WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without?

In my WordPress session at Barcamp Portland this past weekend, one of my favorite questions started the discussion: What are the most essential, must-have WordPress Plugins? My answer? None. Okay, not really. My honest answer is one: Akismet. Spam is the bane of our web experience. It comes in our emails and site comments. While […]

Firefox 5 Crashes: What is Causing Them and How to Fix It

If you are one of the thousands suffering constant crashes from the June update of Mozilla Firefox 5, realize you are not alone. Literally thousands have reported on Firefox 5 crashing across all platforms, including Windows and Mac. UPDATE: The crashes were clearly not a result of problems with Firefox but with Adobe Flash. Crashes […]

WordPress 3.2 Released: Faster, Prettier, Powerful

WordPress 3.2 has been officially released, this time after a fairly short testing time period. To upgrade, use the built-in automatic upgrade. According to the announcement, this is the 15th major release of WordPress. Wow, that just doesn’t seem possible, and yet it also feels like too few. How far WordPress has come since 2003, […]

Security and Protection: Understand the Social in a Crime Network and How to Protect Yourself

While the following is a bit off-topic, my head is spinning with all the layers and networks I’ve uncovered within this recent experience. A friend of mine called this a combination assembly line meets Wikipedia of crime social networks. It begins with my car being broken into and my purse stolen a few months ago, […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Customizing the Author Bio Box

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I’ve covered how to showcase the authors within the WordPress Theme design, talked about how to manage author content within WordPress to help you see all the ways you can promote your authors within the design and content management system, and started showing you code and […]