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!

If you get lots of comment spam and DO have the Akismet plugin installed and updated in your WordPress, check the dates of the posts that the spam-comments are being left on. Chances are high that much of the spam is left on older posts. I guess the spammers figured we wouldn’t notice?

Take a look at the Discussion settings from the WP main menu. Note under Other comment settings the third line down where you can fill in the number of days after which an article can’t be commented on.

Discussion Settings in WordPress

Fill in some value less than 30 days and that will knock down the number of spam comments left on your blog. Don’t forget to scroll down the discussion settings page and hit the Save Changes button.

There is at least one alternative WordPress plugin (and there’s probably many more, but I haven’t needed to check for any) that was commented on in a positive way, called WP-Spam Free. Might be worth checking out.

Keep bloggin!

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.

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site - Operation aborted.

The problem was traced to the older IE browsers’ inability to render the page completely before it tried to execute some javascript code.

The solution was to add a simple defer tag to each javascript call, like so:

<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript" src="src goes here">/*code goes here*/</script>


Thanks goes out to Richard for posting his found solution. Thanks, Richard!

Microsoft also indicates that this error can be avoided by updating your browser to the latest version, which at this time is IE8. Now, if only all my clients would do the same!

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!

Firefox also champions the use of future CSS, which are CSS features that will only be seen by IE users at some time in the future. Ok, I made that up, but since Internet Explorer is playing the catchup game, I think it’s only fitting to point out an example.

Looking at some CSS basics…we have a way to draw a box around some content. It’s called the border property. The top, left, right and bottom sides of the box can be assigned diferent values for the width, style and color. Each of these values can be assigned separately or all at once.

Separately:

All together, in the order width, style, color:

If you want to have different widths, styles or colors for your box, then you’ll have to use the properties that target each side, like so:

That’s nice, but sometimes we really don’t want the square boxy look. Rounded corners are nice, aren’t they? Well, our Firefox users can see rounded corners for the same box that we’ve built for our menu. All we have to do is add one property to the menu, called the -moz-border-radius, and specify its size. IE simply ignores this property, so those boxes will show pointed corners.

.roundedbox {
-moz-border-radius:10px;
}

The 10 pixel radius is the size of the rounded corner. We probably want to add a little padding to the menu box so the content isn’t smashed against the border, so we’ll set that at 10 px, too.

Here’s a menu box that will show rounded corners in Firefox/Mozilla browsers:

There are ways to get the rounded corner look in IE browsers, but it’s a bit more work. For now, we’ll continue to use the -moz-border-radius property in appreciation of our Firefox users.