WordPress Database Backup is a plugin that I’d relied on in the past to keep a randomly backed up copy of a WordPress site. Unfortunately, that’s not a complete solution as the images or uploads folder, as well as any modified theme pages, won’t be saved during the database backup. Nor will the blog links! Keep an archive copy of everything you put on your website, so everything can be reconstructed in the case of a disaster or even a host switch. In case a website is made up of more than one database, you’d need a different backup solution than what a WordPress plugin can provide.

Use CRON jobs to automate the task of backing up all your hard work. It might take a while to figure things out, but once you do you’ll be secure in the knowledge that you did it and your data is safe.

At first I didn’t have the command part right for the cron job to work. After the time elements you need to indicate the path to sh, any flags (none used here), and the path to the shell script. In this case the command was -

/bin/sh /home/owner/backup/automysqlbackup.sh

where “owner” is the CPanel login name, and “backup” is an empty directory or folder that you create above the public_html directory. Some hosts will have a folder called “etc” already created for you. Check with your host!

In this case the /bin/sh directory was already created at the server level, in other words, I didn’t have to create it. The corresponding first line in the .sh file was -

#!/bin/sh

Originally, the .sh file had an opening #!/bin/bash, but that didn’t work on this particular host.

• A great explanation of CRON commands is found in the rainbow. Nice touch, guys!
• Best explanation of setting up automysqlbackup shell script.
• Get the open source database backup script from sourceforge, automysqlbackup.

The host tells me the script is running successfully, so I know the lack of output is my fault – somewhere. Checks the paths…found it! An error in the path for the configuration file lead to the script trying to run with default parameters, some of them blank. The script ran as far as it could so there was no error reported by the cron daemon to my email address. When the output is successful a log file is sent to that address.

When I finally got the paths straightened out, the backup files were zipped and in their proper places and an email log was sent to the proper address at the time the cron job was to run. It worked! Now I’ll go back and set up a couple of other cron jobs to back up other databases. I’ll use the same script, modified to back up different sets of databases on different schedules.

• If you’re looking for a simple script to make one database backup and save that on your server, check out DaniWeb’s CRON job for backup.
• Backing up your home directory is just as easy!

Once you have your sites backed up automatically, you can do away with any backup plugins that you may have relied on in the past. When at all possible, automate the task of backing up a database. It’ll make your life easier!

WordPress 3.0 is here and it’s definitely worth the download. The time you could save in keeping your blogging software up-to-date alone by using WP 3.0 is worth the upgrade. When it comes time to update the WordPress software, including plugins, all it takes is one click!

I love the new Twenty Ten theme for its wider view and its modern look and feel. It’s easy to modify, too.

Just take a look at this video for a quick lesson about WordPress 3.0 -

You can just let it ride and those comments identified by Akismet as spam will silently disappear in a month’s time. In the meantime your database will be getting bigger and bloated with thousands of lines of useless information. Will this bog down your blog? Perhaps it will.

I found another reason to manually delete all the spam comments on one of my WP blogs. From the WP Dashboard I saw 1000+ spam comments and went to edit the comments. When I clicked on ‘spam’, the anti-virus software on this computer, AVG, detected a threat on the spam comments page and blocked my access to it. Even after shutting down the browser and returning to the edit spam comments page another day, the AVG software wouldn’t let me in. How could I delete the spam if I can’t get to the page to do it? Even if I could get to that page it would take a long time to delete so many comments. There must be a better solution to getting rid of spam comments in WordPress.

So, how do you mass delete spam comments in WordPress? Check out this excellent video that provides a solution using phpmyadmin and your WordPress blog database.

Steps to follow:

1. sign in to CPanel
2. open up phpmyadmin and select the WP database
3. click on “wp_comments” table and browse to see the comments
4. backup database by clicking on database name in left column, click on export tab, select all tables under Export, select SQL, check “save as file”, click Go to download database backup to your computer
5. select comments table, by clicking on the table name wp_comments, then click on the SQL tab
6. use an sql query to mass delete spam comments in WordPress by typing the following in the Run SQL Query box:

   DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = 0

   Click Go, click OK.

7. Comments deleted!

If you are using a spam catcher, like Akismet, the value for comment_approved may be set to “spam”, so you’ll need to alter the query as follows:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘spam’

Don’t forget to use the single quote marks to enclose the word spam.

Verify that the number of records in the comments table has been reduced to the number of approved comments. Hooray!

Optimize the WordPress database by going to the Structure tab, or clicking on the database name in the left column, and at the bottom of the table listing click on “Check tables having overhead”. Choose “optimize table” from the spin box on the right and all the extra space that those nasty spam comments took up will be released and the database optimized.

Go back to database view and verify that the overhead space has been removed. The size column now represents the space that is actually used by the database.

Refresh your WP blog and the spam comments will be gone. Isn’t is great to see ZERO spam comments?!

Alternatively, you can catch spam before it lands in your WP blog by modifying the function.php file in your theme using these excellent directions from Tejaswini.

Also, try Soumen Halder’s list of ways to reduce comment spam on WP blogs.

As with any kind of software, there are free and open source alternatives to paid versions. The one pay-software for site stats worth mentioning here is called Mint and is found at haveamint.com. It’s a totally configurable way to look at your site stats. If you don’t have many web properties, the $30 per site license isn’t too bad.

Let’s take a look at the software that doesn’t cost anything but an investment of time….

Site statistics are included in CPanel which comes with most hosting packages. Once you sign in to CPanel, look under the Logs section for Awstats or Webalizer Stats. More people seem to talk about using Awstats, but if you go to Webalizer Stats and click on any month name under the summary you’ll get all the same data that is provided by Awstats. Pick one whose layout is easy to read and you’ll have your site statistics at your fingertips.

Google Analytics (GA) is geared towards marketers and can easily be integrated with an Adwords or Adsense account, both from Google. If you want to formulate a plan for meeting sales goals or increasing conversions, the big G can help you when you link your existing accounts. Some folks have written that they don’t trust Google and don’t want Big Brother knowing their every move online, so they shy away from using a GA account.

Instead, you could rely on a free alternative called statcounter. Visit statcounter.com and click on the features page. You’ll see many of the same items listed that occur in your CPanel stats options. The downside to using statcounter or GA is that you’ll have to dig into the page code and insert a few lines of code. It’s not that hard, but it does take a little time to set up. You only have to set it up once, though.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, try the stats plugin found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/ for a pretty look at your site stats.

Here’s what I did to update from Collapsable blogroll to Collapsing Blogroll:

• Downloaded collroll, unpacked the zip file, ftp’d the folder ‘collroll’ and its contents to wp-contents/plugins/.
• Logged in to the WordPress dashboard and edited the links page where I had used the older plugin, Collapsable blogroll, to create a list of links from the blogroll. I changed <!–catlinkspage–> to [collroll] and saved the page.
• From the Manage Plugins page I deactivated Collapsable blogroll, then activated Collapsing Blogroll.
• When I visited the links page, all the links were hidden, or collapsed, and the words Expand | Collapse were visible. Clicking on expand showed all the links. (I’m not sure the words expand/collapse need to be there as you can set the links page default to either expanded or collapsed.)
• Once I knew that the new plugin worked as expected, then I deleted the older plugin.

Improvements in the plugin allow you to change the appearance of your links page from the WP dashboard. Visit the new Collapsing Blogroll page that is listed under Settings in your WP-admin.

From there you can select a title background color by clicking on the white color swatch. A color picker comes up that lets you select whatever color you want by picking it from the rainbow or entering the RGB/#hex values. If you uncheck the box “use this color” next to the title background, then there is a transparent background, or no background color depending on your point of view.

Also featured in the newer plugin, you can select the order of categories or links as either alphabetical or one of your own choosing, which is especially useful if you use a different plugin to order your links. Since I’d been using “My Link Order” on a site where the Collapsing Blogroll was installed, this feature was a relief to see.

From the settings page you can specify the width of the blogroll div, in px or %, so your link list can fit in the sidebar or other space you’ve created.

And finally, indicate whether you’d like the initial link list to be collapsed by default, or not. Make sure to save your new settings.

Collapsing Blogroll will be really helpful for those sites where there are many links, especially when the list of links changes from time to time. Works in WP 2.8.4! Thanks again, Romain!

It took a little bit of searching to find the plugin called Collapsable Blogroll, but it does exactly what was needed. Downloading the file collapsable-blogroll.0.1.zip, unzipping it, uploading it to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activating it via the wp-admin page went smoothly. No surprises there.

All you have to do is place <!–catlinkspage–> where you want your blogroll list of links to appear. It’s that easy! Put your links inside a post or a page — it’s your choice. By default the link list is separated into the categories of your WP blog and each list is shown in the collapsed state. Just click on the category name and the list will expand to show all your links.

I like the fact that you could add a new link to your blogroll via the wp-admin and it would show up right away on the links page.

The Collapsable Blogroll plugin works with WordPress 2.8. Thanks, Romain!

Page Links To has basically one purpose. According to the author you can “make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL.” Exactly what I was looking for!

Like most other plugins downloading the page-links-to.zip file, unpacking and uploading the plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activating the plugin was simple.

Then, all you have to do is make a new WP page by entering its title and leaving the content blank. Scroll down to the Page Links To widget and enter the URL that you want your page to link to. Here, you can choose whether the redirect is 302-a temporary move, or not. The default is 301-permanent move. That’s it!

Verify that all went smoothly by clicking on your page and you’ll see that it links to the outside URL. By the way both WordPress pages and posts can point to the URLs that you like. Might be great for resource pages or links to related sites.

Page Links To works with WordPress 2.8. Thanks, Mark!

I couldn’t get this plug-in to work until I changed “.php” to “*.*” in the ‘include files of type’ box. When I tried that it took mere seconds for the software to replace 180 instances of a single change across all my files in the designated folder.

Fantastic savings of time and effort! Thanks Chami!

Poke around Apache.com, or better yet, read about Apache mod_rewrites in particular.

Need to learn about PHP? RTFM found online: PHP Manual.

So, why is WP Super Cache so popular? Simply put, it will speed up your blog.

WP Super Cache creates a static html page and serves that up to visitors of your blog instead of the dynamic php pages. Visitors who are logged in to your blog, or who have left a comment, will see the dynamic php pages instead of the static, cached pages. By creating and using a static page that is cached the activity on your server will be reduced and it will run faster.

Installation Tips for WP Super Cache Plugin

• Assure that the Apache mod mime and mod rewrite modules are installed.
• WordPress fancy permalinks must be enabled.
• PHP safe mode should be disabled.
• Backup your .htaccess before installing the plugin.
• Upload the WP Super Cache folder to your plugins directory, where it will create a ‘wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/’ directory.
• Activate “WP Super Cache” on the WP plugins page.
• Go to Settings->WP Super Cache and enable caching.
• Visit the installation page for WP Super Cache to assure that the newly created .htaccess files – there are 2 of them! – were created properly.

In my case the .htaccess file in the root directory could not be modified as the permissions on that file were set as read-only. I had to manually add the lines of code from supercache to the existing .htaccess file. The second .htaccess file “wp-content/cache/.htaccess” was created correctly by supercache.

Now, after you’ve installed and activated the WP Super Cache plugin, when your blog gets really popular your server should be able to better handle the influx of new traffic.

Search engines may or may not consider Meta statements when listing your sites in the search engine results pages, but if they do wouldn’t you want your blog’s meta data to be the best it can be? Since search engines send traffic to your blog, you should be satisfying those search engines by providing them with the most accurate information about your blog.

To be the most effective Meta statements should be page-specific, so that each page has a meta title, meta description and meta keywords that reflect the content of each page. Using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress blogs simplifies the creation of post- or page-specific Meta statements.

After you have installed and activated the All in One SEO Pack plugin, scan down the write a new post page and look for the All in One SEO Pack feature. Click on the right-pointing triangle to open this feature.

All in One SEO Plugin Feature for WordPress

Fill in your keyword-laden title and description making sure not to get too wordy. List your keywords for that post separated by commas.

If there is some reason to turn off this plugin, you can do it per post by ticking the box next to “Disable on this page/post”.

One nice thing about using Meta descriptions is that search engines may use your carefully written description in the Meta statement, instead of grabbing the first few words of your post, when describing your site in the search results listings.

Use the All in One SEO Pack plugin to entice new site visitors by writing your own Meta statements instead of leaving it up to chance.