I can not stress how important it is to make regular backups of the important data on your computer. I backup certain files almost daily and have been doing this for years. I was lucky in that I started this practice a couple of months before a hard drive completely died.

I didn’t have any hardware failures recently but was having software problems (Windows). Earlier this week I got fed up and decided to reinstall Windows and restore from a disk image. And I didn’t have to really worry too much because I knew my external drive had all of the data that I wanted to keep – actually it probably has more than I need and I should clean it up.

If I hadn’t had the backup or if the problem had become worse and I hadn’t been able to use my computer, this would have been a much more serious issue that took up a lot more than an evening to deal with. Although, I should admit that I have old computers and parts that I keep around for emergencies since my livelihood depends on a working computer. Still, I work best on my current desktop.

And I’m so happy that I did the reinstall – more computer is super fast again and it seems like it’s new.

Do you backup regularly? If not, you should. And, if you do, what do you use? I use an external hard drive and have a script that backups certain directories.

If you are feel like it, you can take the poll.

photo credit: 4nitsirk

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Do You Backup the Important Data on Your Computer

This week I have WordPress, freelancing, adsense, backing up, Muppets, and more.

Enjoy!

• Building Your Freelance Business Around WordPress – Ways that a freelance business could be centered around WordPress ;-)
• How to Decide Which Jobs to Take and When to Say No – I’ve become better at determining this. Often, I can tell from the very first email that I don’t want the job. For example, I am not going to build and design a WordPress site in 5 days – that’s just not going to happen.
• Yes. Another Backup Lecture. – Backup, Backup, Backup!! I really can’t stress this enough.
• What Are The Alternatives to Google AdSense? – If you can’t use Adsense or if you are interested in alternatives, this list covers the best ones.
• Custom WordPress Homepage with Customizable Widgets – A custom homepage tutorial for WordPress that covers page templates, widgets, and a slider.
• Window Farming: A Do-It-Yourself Veggie Venture – I’m very interested in indoor gardening as I don’t have any yard space. This article is about growing veggies in your window. I have, however, scored a teeny piece of yard from my landlord so we will be doing a little planting outside – some of my seeds have sprouted so we will be transferring them.
• How to Optimize a WordPress Database – If you don’t mind digging into phpmyadmin, this article will help optimize your database. As with anything, I recommend backing up the database before you get started.
• John Cleese on The Muppet Show
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Lists 4/11/10

This week I have exporting google docs, Amelia Earhart, walkable cities and more.

• Google Docs Batch Export – How to backup all of your google docs into one zip file that you can download. This is awesome – I’m obsessive about backups.
• Earhart’s Final Resting Spot Believed Found – Discovery believes that the location of Amelia Earhart’s crash has been located. How convenient that it is just in time for the film.
• Korny Zucchini Pizza – I’ve been into cooking lately and Patricia has posted this awesome Zucchini Pizza recipe. I’ve got to try making this.
• 30 Nature Inspired Website Designs for Your Inspiration – I love looking at these gorgeous designs. I also hate looking at them because it makes me feel like I could never create something so cool.
• 25 Best Walking Cities (in the USA) – The 25 most walkable cities in the US. I’m thrilled to see Philly listed as #4. And since our public transit system is threatening another strike, we are all going to be walking. ;-)
• Best of Best WordPress Custom Login Page Designs – Did you know you can customize your WordPress login page? Yep, you can. And here are some cool login designs.
• A Day at The Office
  
• An Elephant and a Dog who are best friends at The Elephant Sanctuary
  

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Lists 11/1/09

You have probably already noticed this in the WordPress dashboard but WordPress 2.8.1 was released a couple of days ago.

WordPress 2.8.1 fixes a number of bugs and corrects some security problems with the plugin administration pages.

If you have already upgraded to 2.8, I highly recommend that you upgrade to 2.8.1 as soon as you can. If you are still running 2.7.1, you should upgrade, but it doesn’t need to happen right away.

Here are some of the most important bugs that were fixed.

1. The amount of memory used by the dashboard has been reduced. A number of people were getting out of memory errors, which resulted in only a partial page being loaded.
2. The visual editor wasn’t being loaded for some users due to compression issues. This problems has been corrected.
3. Better security has been enabled for plugins that don’t do specific checks on permissions.
4. And … the big one. The automatic upgrade no longer deletes files after a failed upgrade. Yep, the automatic upgrade would fail and then delete a number of the WordPress files. That is not good. But, apparently it has been corrected.

As always, please back up your database and WordPress files before upgrading, make sure your necessary plugins are compatible with the new version, and upgrade manually, if possible. My WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Issues and Recommendations article has a list of steps to take before any upgrade.

Here is a video about the main features in WordPress 2.8.

photo credit: Rgtmum

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress 2.8.1 Released

I don’t usually post on Fridays but after monitoring twitter and the WordPress forums for issues with the WordPress 2.8 upgrade, I decided a quick post was needed. And, yes, WordPress 2.8 was released a day late.

I always recommend NOT upgrading the first day a new version of WordPress is released. While WordPress itself is stable there are SO many plugins and themes that can cause issues. And it’s not possible for the WordPress gang to test for every possible configuration out there.

So, first, please note that this message is just a notification it is not a command or an order. It may be tempting but it is not required that you click the link.

Before you do click on that link take the time to do a little bit of research.

1. Check the forums for issues that others are having.
2. Check the plugin compatibility list. Do you have any plugins that you can’t live without or that will break your site if deactivated?
3. Check the theme compatibility list. This is especially true for Thesis users. Wait for the go ahead from Thesis before upgrading.
4. If you still must click the link, MAKE A BACKUP of your database, wp-content folder and wp-config file. You should be backing these up regularly anyway.
5. If you don’t know how to use ftp, troubleshoot potential issues, or restore the previous version of WordPress, either wait to upgrade or find a friend who can help you out. I certainly don’t like to earn money off of people’s misfortunes but if you do run into a big problem, I can fix it for you.

If you blog isn’t that important to you, then ignore my advice. If, like me, you depend on it for your livelihood, I highly recommend taking a deep breath and doing some research and site maintenance before clicking the upgrade button. And, you know me, I still think manual upgrades are the way to go.

photo credit: Crashmaster007

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade Issues and Recommendations

I’ve had some on again off again computer problems for a little over a week now. Other than family and health issues there is nothing that frustrates me more than computer problems. And I know a decent amount about troubleshooting and fixing so I can’t even imagine how frustrating computer issues are for people who are less technically inclined. (I suppose it’s similar to car trouble – I don’t know how to fix a car but I can frequently pinpoint the cause of the problem. This is an odd quirk of mine as I despise cars and don’t even own one.) Anyway …

But as I’m addicted to my computer – the internet and playing games – and NEED the computer to earn money I don’t really have the patience to deal with the issues. Plus, this computer is only 8 months old. And, no, I can’t call Dell for support as I have my computers custom built.

So … I am running Windows XP on this computer. It took me forever to let go of Windows 98 and it will probably take me a long time to let go of XP. I will not use Vista and am keeping half an eye on Windows 7. But at this point, I would install Linux, which I usually run on a partition and dual boot with Windows, before letting go of XP.

And I’m sure a smarty-pants out there will tell me all my problems will be solved by running a MAC. Well, there are three issues with that. I like to play games, I think Apple products are very overpriced, and they are too proprietary. How do I open up the machine and swap out parts and do things the way I like? A pc is like driving a stick-shift (does anyone know how to drive a stick anymore) and a MAC is like an automatic. At least that’s the way I see it.

When I would boot my computer it would hang between the Windows XP screen and the login screen. It would just hang and hang and hang. After restarting like 5 times I finally booted into safe mode, did nothing, and when I restarted, the machine came up. I decided to run virus and spyware scans, defrag and run error checking. I found a virus (don’t get me started on how THAT happened as I am vigilant about spyware and viruses) did all the maintenance and the computer started booting fine. Well, for a couple of days.

Then it happened again. I could restart the computer but if the computer was off for any length of time, and I usually turn it off when I’m at work, it would hang at the login screen. I assumed that it was a Windows problem because I wasn’t getting any beeps or indications of faulty hardware.

I decided to run a repair with the Windows CD. This will reinstall Windows files but won’t mess with your personal files or settings. But, if you can access your computer, do a backup first. As I have mentioned before I backup certain directories with all of my important files and my program settings – basically My Documents and Application Data. A downside of repair is that you still need to do a Windows Update to get Windows back to the way it was.

The repair seemed to work. The computer was fine for about three days – I did realize after the fact that the computer was on the entire three days so I wasn’t quite correct in my logic of it being fixed.

After being off all day the computer again hung before the login screen. I decided to reformat. I didn’t want to because it takes a long time and I have to reinstall everything. I convinced myself that it would be a good thing because after the reformat the computer would be clean and speedy. I also decided I would start with a clean Firefox profile and only import my bookmarks. I’ve been copying over the same profile for years and it was just bogging Firefox down.

After reformatting, everything seemed fine when suddenly my second hard drive disappeared from the file manager and I couldn’t get Windows to recognize it. It then occurred to me that maybe the second hard drive was the problem. It isn’t bootable but maybe Windows was hanging when trying to read it. (Now I don’t know this for sure but have found forum threads describing similar problems – if anyone out there wants to tell me my logic is wrong, please do so and tell me why.)

I removed the second hard drive but Windows still wasn’t happy. It was slow and Explorer kept crashing – definitely not something that should happen on a fresh install.

Fortunately, I hadn’t reinstalled everything yet so I decided to reformat again without the possible bad secondary hard drive installed. So far, everything seems to be better but I’ve only had the computer off for 2.5 hours since doing this – not all day. Since I’ve been sick and am really behind in my work because of the computer I’m going to leave it on for now. Great solution, huh?

Since I hadn’t already had enough fun I also decided to get my previous computer running – that way I would have a backup if this one crapped out again. Of course, I had pillaged the parts and and had to go through my various geek boxes to find all the missing pieces. I only had one hard drive, however, that was suitable to run in that machine – the one that I thought was the cause of all the problems.

I got the machine up and running but guess what, it kept hanging at the Windows XP screen during the install. This helps me believe that my theory about the hard drive being bad is correct. It still works but it is corrupt or dying. Kind of surprising because I believe that hard drive is only a little over a year old. (I’ve not had good luck with Western Digital). So, I’ve ordered an affordable hard drive and will install it in the 2nd machine. If Windows loads fine than I will feel confident that the hard drive was the problem. I will also dare to turn this machine off since I will have a spare. And remember, I backup every day so transferring files to it won’t be a huge deal.

But I’ve kind of had it. It seems the more advanced computers get the faster parts die or problems occur. I know with faster processors that heating can be an issue but memory goes, fans break, and hard drives die faster. I still have an 11 year old Pentium 266 with Windows 98 that runs fine. The only part that’s been replaced is the cd-rom. I’m tempted to pull that out, put Linux on it and be done with all this foolishness. (And, yes, I have old computers and parts in this house. They are well organized and are in a closet. And, no, I don’t have every one that I’ve owned.)

I’ve also been thinking about buying a laptop. Well, I think about it a lot but finally seriously. I really need the mobility. I just have kept a desktop because I like to play games and gaming laptops can be pricey. But the thing is, I can’t pull out and change the parts on a laptop like I did on these machines. While it gives me freedom of movement it takes away my freedom of self-repair.

If you’re still with me here, thanks. I know it’s a long article. This is just what I’ve been doing while being sick instead of actually earning money. Yesterday someone mentioned that they hadn’t seen me around the blog or Twitter much lately. Well, now you know why. Do I know how to have fun or what?

I guess the bright side is that my computer doesn’t look like the one in the photo at the top of the article.

photo credit: pyroclastichawk

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Computer Problems – Windows XP Hangs Before Login Screen

This weekend will be the official start of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Part of the start of Spring is spring cleaning – the time to clear out the Winter cobwebs, wash the windows, and get the house in order. But don’t worry, I’m not going to deviate from my standard topics and discuss cleaning. I am, however, going to show you how you can use the start of Spring as a time to do some WordPress spring cleaning.

Because, really, what’s more fun than backups and cleaning out your files?

1. Backup Your WordPress Database – you can use the WP DB-Backup plugin, back it up via cpanel, or ask your webhost about the best way to back up your data. If you lose your WordPress database, you’ve lost your site.
2. Remove Plugins – remove any plugins that you are no longer using. Don’t just deactivate them but also completely delete them. You can do this via ftp or your cpanel file manager. Any plugin, even if it isn’t being used, can be a security risk, if it is poorly coded, and can slow down your site.
3. Backup Your WordPress Files – backup your WordPress files, config file, themes, plugins, etc. This is separate from the database. These files are not *as* important as the database but if you’ve customized your theme it would be distressing to lost all of that work. You can backup via ftp or the cpanel file manager. You can also backup themes, plugins and uploads with the WordPress backup plugin but this does not backup the core files.
4. Upgrade WordPress – upgrade WordPress to the current version. 2.7 is awesome and you’ll be avoiding potential security risks. I’m not a fan of any auto-upgrades, so here are my instructions for upgrading WordPress manually.
5. Remove Post Revisions – you can old ones manually with Stratos’ instructions, or remove old ones with the Delete Revisions plugin found by David Bradley. Let’s keep our WordPress database as light as we can.
6. Examine Your Sidebar – take a hard look at your sidebar. Do you really need all that bling? If you have a lot of images, ads, and flashy things on your sidebar it is slowing your site down.
7. Examine Old Posts – go through your older posts and see if you can add links to newer ones. I have to admit that I am not good about this. I usually remember to link to my older posts but rarely go back the other way. This adds value to your visitors and has got to be useful from a SEO perspective.
8. Validate Your Code – this is for the especially industrious. The W3C has a tool where you can test your code for errors. It lists all of them and then you can have the pleasure of tracking them down and fixing them. I am lax on this one and have it on my current spring cleaning list because I know I currently have 27 errors.
9. Your Turn – Do you have anything to add to the WordPress spring cleaning list? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

As an aside, this is my 200th post!!

photo credit: Steve took it

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

8 WordPress Spring Cleaning Tips: Backups and More

It seems that backing up is going to be the theme for the week.

I have frequently mentioned that there is a plugin to automate backing up the WordPress database but that there wasn’t an automated solution for backing up the template and plugin directories.

Well, now there is a plugin that will assist in backing up your themes, plugins and uploads directories.

WordPress Backup is a new plugin that will backup your themes, plugins and uploads directories. You can schedule the backups in three intervals; hourly, daily and weekly. (Can anyone tell me why you would need an hourly backup?) The backups can be emailed to you, if the files aren’t too large. Links are also provided on the plugin’s options page, which provides a simple click to download right from the WordPress admin. Two of the three were emailed to me when I tested the plugin; themes and plugins. Apparently the Uploads backup was too large so I downloaded it with the provided link – the file was over 19MB. (I definitely need to examine what I have stored in there.)

The backup email looks like the following:

I was impressed by the email. The subject line told which directory was included in the email, the email contained the date and time and was very professional, and the zip file was attached.

After installing the plugin the paths to the directories need to be set. The plugin found my paths so it seems that on standard WordPress installations that this won’t be a problem. It did, however, require a backup directory to be created in wp-content and the directory needed to have full (777) permissions. Update: Donace noted that a folder with full permissions in wp-content could be a security risk. I created a folder above /public_html/, gave it full permissions, and changed the path in the settings for the plugin. The backups still worked without any problems. The options page provided all of this information and I didn’t have to go back to the plugin page or the read me file to figure this out. I created the directory, saved the options and the plugins and themes backups were emailed to me and a link was provided to backup all three directories.

So far, I am impressed with the ease of use and the function of this plugin. The author says it can be memory intensive but if it is run weekly, I don’t see this as being a problem. And personally, I don’t see a reason to back any of these files up more often than weekly. I do, however, want to test it over a longer time period and make sure the memory doesn’t become an issue.

What do you think? Does this make the backups easier? Is this something that you would use?

photo credit: godog

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

WordPress Backup Plugin for Themes, Plugins and Uploads

I have frequently discussed the importance of backing up your data and only relying on yourself to do so.

I have written about backing up the important data on your hard drive, backing up your gmail, and backing up your WordPress installation.

At the end of last year, blogging platform, Journalspace, which I never heard of before this mishap, had a backup plan go awry and all of their customer data was lost.

TechCrunch reported that all of Journalspace backup data was overwritten. This was either caused by a bad backup system, a disgruntled ex-employee, or a combination of the two. All users of Journalspace have lost their blogs – the only way to retrieve any data is by using google cache. The company has, obviously, gone out of business and is selling all of their property, including domain and trademarks.

This is, of course, an extreme example but anything can happen where your data is stored. Recently, there was a fire alarm at my webhost, which shut down the servers and required an evacuation. It turned out to be a false alarm but what if it hadn’t been and I didn’t have a backup of my data.

I also had a hard drive die just two months after I started backing up my important files on a scheduled basis. I would have lost my photos, music, and other important documents.

For some reason humans tend to think bad things won’t happen and don’t plan for them. A street light isn’t installed a dangerous intersection until someone gets hurt, renter’s insurance isn’t purchased until after a theft, and a backup plan isn’t implemented until after data is lost. Hopefully my readers are more proactive and realize that even a company like google could lose their data or lock them out of their account. Better to have a plan for when things go wrong then to create a plan after something has already been lost.

Do you backup your important data? If so, how do you do so? If not, when are you going to start?

photo credit: asmith62378

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

Lessons in Backing Up – The Journalspace Disaster

Anyone who’s been visiting for awhile knows that I’m not a big fan of the Auto-Upgrade plugin for WordPress and that I prefer upgrading manually. I’m not against the plugin. I think it’s made it possible for more people to upgrade their own WordPress installations. I prefer manually upgrading because I have more control (and I’m not a control freak, just a scheduling freak) and I am better able to troubleshoot the problem when something goes wrong with the upgrade.

And things do go wrong. Frequently. That being said, the Auto-Upgrade Plugin works fine when the upgrade is minor, such as from a .1 to a .2 version. But if you are upgrading from WordPress 2.0 to 2.6.2, I highly recommend you do it manually. If you aren’t familiar with the process, I recommend someone do the upgrade for you.

I think many people don’t want to manually upgrade because the instructions in the WordPress codex are daunting. Delete this, don’t delete that, oh wait, delete that unless… I think you know what I mean.

So, I thought if I listed the steps that I take for a manual upgrade, that it might make the task less frightening for the rest of you. Some may have more efficient ways of doing a manual upgrade and I would love to hear about it. This is just the way I do it and it works for me.

1. Download and extract the WordPress upgrade to your hard drive.
2. If plugins are important to you, make sure your plugins are compatible with the version of WordPress that you are upgrading to. You can do this be searching google on WordPress and the name of the plugin.
3. Backup your database. You can do this through cpanel or via the WordPress databases backup plugin. You are already backing up your database, right?
4. Test the backup. It should look like a big text file of running together gibberish. If you don’t have that, then stop the upgrade
5. Backup your WordPress files – all of them. Backup the wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes, and all of the files in your blog directory. You can do this via cpanel or via ftp. I use ftp and copy them all over to my hard drive so I have them while upgrading. You should be backing up these files on a regular basis as well. Thinkdave has a great guide to using ftp with Filezilla.
6. Test the backup. Spot check and make sure the files are there – especially wp-config.php and your wp-content folder.
7. Install and activate the Maintenance Mode plugin. One note here – if you are backing up from a much older version of WordPress, skip this step. I find it can cause unnecessary problems and it’s better for your site to simply be down temporarily then to have to struggle to bring it backup later.
8. Deactivate ALL of your plugins, except for Maintenance Mode. Please don’t skip this step
9. Logout of WordPress
10. Ok – back to FTP or your cpanel file manager.
11. Delete WP-Admin – yes, the entire folder
12. Delete WP-Includes – if you have language files, keep those. I haven’t upgraded a site that had them so most of you are safe in deleting the entire folder. And remember, we already made backups.
13. Delete all of the files in the blog directory such as wp-cron.php, wp-login.php, etc except for wp-config.php (that contains your database information). But if you get delete happy, you already have a backup.
14. DO NOT delete wp-content. Some upgrade instructions say to keep some of the files but not all of them. 98% of the time leaving that directory alone is just fine.
15. Now we are ready to upload the new WordPress files
16. Upload the wp-admin directory
17. Upload the wp-includes directory
18. Upload the main blog directory files such as wp-cron.php and wp-login.php The upgrade files should not have wp-config.php but, if it does, don’t overwrite yours.
19. In your web browser, go to your site http://www.yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
20. You may be asked to login. Login.
21. If it was more than a .1 version upgrade, you may get a message saying your database needs to be upgraded. Click the button and upgrade.
22. Activate and upgrade your plugins.
23. If all is well, you are done and are now enjoying your freshly upgraded WordPress

A couple of issues that I have run into have been the following:

1. Can’t login after upgrade. Clear your cache. Clear your cookies. If you still can’t login, delete the plugins folder. You have a backup so they can easily be replaced. This is in wp-content/plugins/. Those three methods have always corrected this problem for me. If you still can’t login, search the codex or contact someone like me for assistance.
2. Scheduled posts no longer work. So far this problem only seems to happen on Windows IIS servers. I have a possible solution here or you can contact me for assistance.
3. Main page loads but get 404 errors on all sub pages. This is probably a permalinks problem. Delete your .htaccess file and replace it with the backup.

Out of all the upgrades I have done for myself and for others those are the only problems that I have encountered. So, I trust my system. If you still don’t feel comfortable upgrading, ask someone for assistance.

photo credit: Danny McL

Post from: (Anti) Social Development

How to Upgrade WordPress Manually