Managing your Blog

Maintaining Your Blog
You need to do some regular housekeeping if you are to maintain a working, active community
web site. Some of those housekeeping tasks are standard things you should do for any
kind of web site: making backups, checking your links, and so on. Some things are WordPressspecific,
and some of them are specific to maintaining your readers’ interest.
None of these maintenance tasks are particularly daunting, and most of them should
occupy no more than a few hours a week. Your biggest maintenance time should be spent
“feeding” your blog: responding to comments, writing new posts, and adding links. In this
chapter, I will show you how to look after your blog, beginning with the most important maintenance
task: backing up your database.
Backing Up and Restoring Your Database
“Why should I make a backup?” you may ask yourself. The answer can be found by imagining
having to ask yourself “Why didn’t I make a backup?” when it all goes wrong. You never want
to be in the situation where you regret not making a backup.
The procrastinator in us will put off generating a backup countless times until it’s too late.
And that’s just the one backup, not an ongoing weekly regime.
Those of you who have been on the receiving end of a disk crash, a software update that
went wrong, or even an Internet service provider going out of business will have learned the
hard way, by having your whole cyber-existence wiped out seemingly at the touch of a button.
Never again will you let yourself be placed in such a disastrous situation. It has happened to
me more than once. Now I think hard about a disaster recovery plan even before I start on a
new project. Even as I write this chapter, I find myself pressing Ctrl+S to save the document
at the end of each line.
The primary considerations of a good backup strategy are that a backup should be easy
to do, should rely as little on human interaction as possible (hence making it easy), and should
be performed regularly. Oh, and of course, because there isn’t much point in generating a lot
of backups without being able to restore them when something does go wrong, a good backup
strategy is only as good as its recovery plan.
You have a few choices when deciding how to back up WordPress databases. You can use
phpMyAdmin or the MySQL Administrator application, which you may have used to create
the databases. You can use the command-line interface to MySQL if you have remote access
to your server. Finally, you can use the WordPress backup plug-in from Skippy.net, which is
the approach I’ll describe here.
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■Note Instructions for backing up WordPress databases using graphical interfaces such as phpMyAdmin,
MySQL Administrator, and the command-line interface to MySQL are available on the WordPress Codex at
http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database.
Making Backups with the WP-DB Backup Plug-In
The WP-DB Backup plug-in provides an easy-to-use interface for backing up your database
tables. With just a few clicks, you can back up all of your WordPress tables.
Installing and Activating the Plug-In
Point your web browser at http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/plugins/
wp-db-backup/ and download the WP-DB Backup plug-in from Skippy.net. At the time of
writing, it’s currently at version 1.7 and mature in development.
Unpack the zipped file to your local drive. It contains four files. Depending on your
primary language, you’ll probably be interested in only two of them: wp-db-backup.php and
wp-dp-backup.txt. The former is the plug-in, and the latter contains the documentation for
the plug-in. The other two files are for language localization.
Installation and configuration are simple. All you need to do is create a directory, upload
the plug-in, and then activate it.
On the web server, navigate to the wp-content folder. Create a directory here named backup
and make it writable by the web server process. This normally involves setting the properties by
right-clicking the directory in the FTP window, or by providing the instruction chmod g+w backup
at the shell command line. If configured to store the generated backups on the web site, this
directory is where the plug-in will store them, which is why it needs to be writable by the web
server. However, by default, the plug-in will expect you to download the backups to your own
local machine and not use this folder. Using a backup folder is the most secure way to handle
your backups and is the approach I recommend.
Next, you need to upload the wp-db-backup.php file to the wp-content/plugins folder. Finally,
go to the administration pages, click Plugins, scroll down until you reach the WordPress Database
Backup plug-in, and click Activate in the right column.
That’s it! The plug-in is installed, configured, and activated.
Backing Up WordPress Tables
Navigate to WordPress’s Manage page, where you’ll notice a new tab labeled Backup. Select
this tab, and you’ll be presented with a page like the one shown in Figure 18-1.
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WP-DB Backup lists all the tables it can find in the database. Here, you can see it lists both
the WordPress tables and the phpBB tables that happened to be installed in the same database.
The plug-in automatically selects all the standard WordPress tables and provides check boxes
to allow you to include any other tables with the backup.
For now, leave the default backup option to download to your computer selected and click
the Backup! button. If all goes well (and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t), you should see the
Backup Progress page, as shown in Figure 18-2.
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Figure 18-1. The standard WP DB-Backup page
The progress bar indicates how far along the backup is. Please do follow the instructions
on this page, which tell you not to touch anything, as the backup will fail otherwise. Note that
until you have a lot of information on your blog to back up, the procedure will likely take only
a few seconds.
The file that is generated and automatically downloaded is a compressed file containing
a single .sql file of MySQL instructions. The size of the .sql file depends on the amount
of information stored on your blog. Once you have a few hundred blog posts and a few
thousand comments, the download file can become quite large. Thankfully, because it is
text, it compresses to a manageable size for downloading, storing on your web server, or
possibly being e-mailed to you. Given that there are e-mail providers giving away 2GB of
storage space for free these days, you could even set up an account purely to receive and
store your blog backups.
■Note Usually, backup experts advise against storing backups in compressed form, mainly because if any
part of the file becomes corrupt, the whole archive is rendered unusable. However, the use of compression
in this instance is appropriate, considering if any part of the single MySQL instruction file contained in the
compressed gzip file becomes corrupt, the whole archive should be discarded anyway. This is because of
the overwhelmingly large proportion of database instructions compared with database information (your blog
data). If one instruction is wrong, recovery is likely to fail catastrophically.
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Figure 18-2. The WP DB-Backup progress page
Take notice of the security warning contained in the documentation for Skippy.net’s
WordPress database backup plug-in and don’t store your backups on the server for any length
of time. This is because the backup files contain sensitive information about your blog. Don’t
let them be seen by unscrupulous people. Keep your backup files not only safe, but secure.
Using the WP-Cron Plug-In for Regular Unattended Backups
Recall the core directives of a good backup strategy: backups must be easy to do, rely as little
on human interaction as possible, and be performed regularly. The WP-DB Backup plug-in
certainly makes backups easy. Now I’m going to introduce to you another useful plug-in from
the same author that will take care of the other two backup strategy requirements.
This next plug-in is WP-Cron, which takes its name from the UNIX command that executes
jobs at a specific time and or date, either once or at regular intervals. You can download
WP-Cron from Skippy.net’s web site at http://www.skippy.net/blog/category/wordpress/
plugins/wp-cron/. By itself, the WP-Cron plug-in doesn’t do much, but when combined with
WP-DB Backup, it enables unattended backups of your WordPress database.
■Tip WordPress Codex “strongly recommends” blog administrators to back up their databases at regular
intervals and before upgrades. You should take this advice!
Unattended—how does that work? The WP-Cron plug-in doesn’t install anything on the
web server, or configure a cron job that the underlying operating system (such as Linux or
Windows Server 2003) runs. In fact, a lot of hosting providers wouldn’t allow you to do that.
Instead, this plug-in relies entirely on someone or something visiting your site, which is a fairly
safe bet these days, with the number of search engine crawlers, TrackBacks, and Pingbacks
interoperating with your site—however unpopular it may be! Any time a page on your site is
requested, it triggers the plug-in. If a preconfigured interval has elapsed, the task will be executed.
In this case, at approximately the same time every day, an unattended backup will be
generated and e-mailed to you.
Download the WP-Cron plug-in from Skippy.net’s web site at http://www.skippy.net/
blog/category/wordpress/plugins/wp-cron/. By now, you know how to install a WordPress
plug-in: unpack the zipped file to your local drive, upload the single file wp-cron.php to the
wp-content/plugins folder, and then go to the Plugins page and activate the WP-Cron plug-in.
You now need to configure unattended backups, because they’re not enabled by default.
Thankfully, this is no more complex than specifying an e-mail address for your backup archive
file delivery.
Return to the Manage page and again choose the tab labeled Backup. Scroll down the page,
and you’ll notice an extra section at the foot of the page, as shown in Figure 18-3. As with the
attended backup (the one requiring you to click the Backup! button), you can also archive
non-WordPress database tables that are present in the same database. To configure unattended
backups, select the Daily check box, enter your chosen archiving e-mail address, and click the
Submit button.
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So, with a couple of great plug-ins and a few clicks, you’ve managed to accomplish your
goal of achieving the magical triumvirate of a good backup strategy: easy to do, with little
human interaction, and performed regularly. Give yourself a pat on the back(up)!
Restoring Your Database
Okay, so you’re here because something catastrophic has gone wrong and you need to restore
your backup. Or you could be moving your blog to a different hosting provider. Or perhaps
you are one of those people who like to prepare for the worst. In any case, you’re interested
in the process of restoring your database from a backup.
■Caution Please understand that even if you’ve been generating backups, you won’t be able to retrieve
the information lost since the last backup.
First, let’s take a look at the recipe for restoring databases. At the top of the list is an archive
file generated by any of the methods: the WP-DB Backup plug-in, the graphical user interfaces of
either phpMyAdmin or MySQL Administrator, or from the command line. Without the archive
file, you can’t achieve much.
■Note If you came here looking for help with a damaged database but haven’t performed a backup, then
you should consider searching through and perhaps posting to the WordPress support forums at http://
wordpress.org/support/.
Although Skippy.net’s WP-DB Backup plug-in makes it easy for you to generate backups
and automate unattended backups, there is no companion restore plug-in or option. This is
because there doesn’t need to be. Restoring is a simple process of applying the generated
archive file to the database, which you can do using the phpMyAdmin interface.
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Figure 18-3. The WP-Cron extension adds a Scheduled Backup section to the WP-DB Backup page.
■Tip If you’re moving your WordPress blog to a new hosting provider, you’ll need to first create the
database as you did in Chapter 14. To make things easy for yourself, name the database exactly as in
your previous installation.
Navigate your web browser to the phpMyAdmin page for your database. It should look
similar to Figure 18-4, which shows the WordPress tables.
Choose the SQL tab at the top of the page, and you will see a page like the one shown in
Figure 18-5. Here, you can enter a query in the large text area in the top part of the page or
choose a text file to upload by clicking the Choose button next to the Location of the textfile
box. Notice that there is a maximum file size indicated, which is 8MB in the example shown
in Figure 18-5. Your limit may differ from this, but the general rule is that uploading files of
around 3MB and above usually proves unsuccessful. In this event, you’re forced to cut segments
from the text file to paste into the text area of the SQL tab, one piece at a time, until
the whole file has been completed.
■Note Prior to populating the WordPress databases with your backup, you’ll need to ensure that all the
current information in there is removed by using the DROP TABLE command in MySQL. The process used
by the WP-DB Backup plug-in does this for you when restoring the backup.
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Figure 18-4. The WordPress database tables in phpMyAdmin
Note that the file upload method can accept gzipped compressed files. This is perfect if
you’ve followed my recommendation and used the WP-DB Backup plug-in, which generates
such a compressed file type.
To restore your backup, upload the latest archive file generated by the WP-DB Backup
plug-in and click the Go button. You will eventually (this can take up to a few minutes) be presented
with a page containing a message similar to the one in Figure 18-6, indicating that the
upload was successful.
Check your blog site now to determine that all is well. Sometimes, a faulty theme can display
a blank page at this stage. If so, swap out the theme to the Default theme (see Chapter 16)
to see if that solves the problem. If that fails to resolve the situation, you may need to resort to
reapplying a new set of WordPress files, but that is a rare event.
Monitoring Storage Space and Bandwidth
To keep your WordPress blog healthy, you need to be conscious of any limits imposed by your
hosting company, because your blog is dynamic—it grows whenever people add comments or
when you write new articles. The following are three limits you need to consider.
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Figure 18-5. Restoring WordPress database backup using phpMyAdmin
Figure 18-6. Successful WordPress database restore using phpMyAdmin
• The storage space used by WordPress, your images, your download files, and so on
• The space taken by your database holding your posts, comments, links, and so on (this
is sometimes counted separately from your main storage)
• The bandwidth used each month by your visitors accessing your pages
Monitoring Your Storage Space
The storage space used by your files is usually more than adequate in current hosting packages,
unless you have an exceptionally large number of images or files. Many hosting companies’
cheapest packages allow from 500MB of storage to as much as 4GB. Some offer considerably
less. I would steer clear of those.
As a rough guide to how much space you might need, WordPress itself, including the
built-in themes and perhaps a couple more themes, is unlikely to be more than 2MB. But if
you have a lot of images, photographs, product images, maps, charts, and so on, this amount
can soon increase. My main web site uses just over 150MB for around 1,800 images, 70% of
which are high-resolution photographs. If you were to store high-quality MP3 music files, then
350 such files might use up 1GB. If you stored lower-quality speech files, 350 of them might
take only 400MB.
The space taken by your database is significantly less. For example, my main blog with
1,100 posts and 58,000 comments uses just 21MB of storage space.
You will need to monitor your storage space usage regularly. The way you check exactly
how much space you are using is different from one hosting company to another. Generally,
you can expect your administration pages, or control panel, to have an option to calculate the
space you have used. How often you should check depends on how quickly your blog grows.
That growth rate is something you will need to judge for yourself. Start by checking once a week
and make a judgment after a month or two. If you are allocated, say, 1GB, and after a month,
you’ve used 10MB, then you don’t really need to check too often. A monthly check should be
enough to give you plenty of warning before you start to run out. If, after a couple of months,
you’ve used 400MB, you will need to monitor it more closely, perhaps on a weekly basis.
If you do find yourself running low on space, or at least heading that way, you have several
options. If you have a lot of high-resolution images, you should consider replacing the older
ones with lower-resolution versions, if that won’t detract from the value of your old posts. Similarly,
if your community blog is a support site for your software and you offer downloads, you
could consider removing the older versions. But make sure any old posts that link to them are
updated. You don’t want to leave bad links in your old posts. I’ll show you how to check for bad
links later in this chapter, in the “Checking Your Links” section.
With regard to your database, there isn’t really a lot you can do to reduce its size. The bulk
of your database is your content: your posts and pages, your visitors’ comments, and your
links. You don’t want to get rid of any of that because it is the lifeblood of your blog. However,
the spam comments can go, as described next.
Cleaning Comment Spam
If you recall from Chapter 15, I mentioned that WordPress doesn’t give you any way to access
comments marked as spam. For that, you need a third-party plug-in. Chris J. Davis’s Spam
Nuker is one such plug-in.
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Download the Spam Nuker plug-in from http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/03/05/
spam-nuker-151/. Install this as a plug-in on your blog and activate it. Go to WordPress’s
Manage page, and you will see an extra tab labeled Spam. Click the Spam tab, and you will
be presented with a page like the one shown in Figure 18-7. The tab includes the number
of spam comments in its title. In the example, a rather excessive 39,000 spam comments
were found. Note that the e-mail and URI in the figure have been intentionally blurred.
The plug-in has two functions:
Mass Spam Nuke: This allows you to remove all the comments marked as spam with a
single click. Simply click the Nuke em, nuke em all! button. However, as the page cautions,
this step is irreversible (database backup not withstanding). You might want to
look at the other function first.
Unspammer: This allows you to change the status of a comment marked as spam.
Depending on how you detect and mark comments as spam, you may end up with some
false positives—some comments marked as spam that should not be. This function allows
you to correct that and rescue those comments. Look down the list of comments. The
name, e-mail, URI, IP address, and a count of duplicates are provided to help you decide
the status of a comment. If you find any comments that should not be marked as spam,
click the check box to the left of the comment. When you have finished with the list, click
the Unspam me! button at the bottom of the page. The comments you marked will be
changed to be ordinary comments, disappear from the spam list, and appear on your site
as normal comments.
When you are sure you have rescued all the legitimate comments, go ahead and click the
Nuke em button. All of your spam comments will be removed from the database, saving you
valuable space.
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Figure 18-7. Spam Nuker management page
Monitoring Bandwidth
Bandwidth usage is another limit your hosting service will specify. Strictly speaking, bandwidth
is the wrong term to use. Hosting companies usually restrict your monthly data
transfer allowance; that is, they monitor how much data is transferred from your account
each month. Unfortunately, the term bandwidth is so commonly used for this allowance
that it has become the way to describe it.
If you exceed the allowed bandwidth, several things may happen:
• The hosting company may shut down your site until the end of the month.
• The hosting company may allow your site to go over the limit but charge you for
the excess (often an excessive amount).
• The hosting company may force you to upgrade your account to one with more
bandwidth allowance.
Most control panels provided by your hosting company have some way to monitor your
bandwidth usage. Figure 18-8 shows one such example from the Plesk control panel (http://
www.sw-soft.com/en/products/plesk/).
If your hosting service provides traffic statistics derived from your web server logs, those
can be another way to monitor your traffic. Figure 18-9 shows a typical monthly chart from
the Webalizer package (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/). From a chart like this, you can
get a good idea of the growth of your traffic and look for trends that look like you might be
exceeding your bandwidth allowance.
Figure 18-10 shows another statistics report from the Webalizer package. This particular
report shows the URLs that use the most bandwidth. In this example, you see that the third
page in the list has managed to generate almost 1.3% of the traffic, despite having only 791
hits. Compare that to the first page in the list, which has of 22,000 hits for 7.4% of the traffic. In
other words, that third file is using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth allowance. I
investigated that post on my blog and saw that it has more than 530 comments, making it a
huge, 400KB page. I can choose to address this issue in some way, perhaps by trimming the
comments that are over a year old. Many statistics package provide reports like this that allow
you to delve into the aggregated data from your server’s web logs.
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Figure 18-8. Plesk traffic report
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Figure 18-9.Webalizer monthly summary
Figure 18-10. Another view of Webalizer statistics
One way to reduce your bandwidth usage is to reduce the size of your pages. A properly
constructed, valid, XHTML web page will be smaller in size than one written in the old-school
style using font tags, tables, and spacer images for layout. Using CSS for styling and layout
reduces the size of your web page so that it downloads quicker and reduces your bandwidth
usage. It will most likely render more quickly in your readers’ browsers, too, which is an added
bonus.
WordPress strives to conform to the XHTML standard, but even though the code delivered
by WordPress may be minimal, it still doesn’t prevent you from writing pages and posts using
the old-school style of web page writing, though it does encourage you to separate presentation
and content by the appropriate use of CSS. In the previous chapter, I illustrated how to
remove the sidebar of calendars, del.icio.us links, and login/register controls. Doing so not
only makes the page cleaner for a single-post-entry context, but also reduces the page weight—
considerably, if your sidebars contain a lot of information, such as a long list of pages, posts,
categories, and so on. The example in Chapter 17 would work well if your most weighty pages
are individual posts, like two of the top three URLs in Figure 18-10.
Checking Your Links
Another regular routine task you should undertake is to check the links on your site. Nothing is
quite so frustrating to a user than to click a link referenced in a blog post, only to find the page
has disappeared. Inevitably, people do move their web sites to new URLs, or they rearrange their
site so that old links to pages no longer work. Sometimes, they abandon their sites altogether.
You cannot control what other people do with the pages you link to, but you can at least make
sure your readers are not disappointed too often.
What you can control is your own links. You should make sure that your own links you make
to, for example, past stories still work. Another source of broken links is the list of links you have
in your blogroll, resources list, and so on, managed by WordPress’s Link Manager (described in
Chapter 17). Finally, readers sometimes leave links in their comments, which can go out-of-date.
You could check each of those links by hand: clicking each in your browser and checking that the
link still works. Unfortunately, that gets tedious after about the first five! Luckily, a number of
solutions to this problem are available, in the form of both online services and desktop tools.
Using Online Link Checking Services
A number of web sites provide online link checking services. They work by reading your web
page after you provide the URL, and checking each of the links they find on your page. One
such tool is Link Valet from the Web Design Group (http://valet.htmlhelp.com/link/).
Figure 18-11 shows a portion of a typical report page.
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As you can see, the report lists each link on the submitted page, along with a status indicating
the link’s health: status 200 is OK, status 302 is also OK, and status 404 means that the
page you linked is reported as not found. Link Valet highlights these in red as an indicator for
you to do something about it: either to correct the inaccurate link or generate the page it’s
attempting to link to.
Another similar service is Link Checker from SiteOwner.com (http://siteowner.bcentral.com/
system/linkcheck.asp). This service reports only links with errors. You don’t need to wade through
screens full of good links to find the broken ones.
The problem with services like these is that you need to submit every single page on your
site to check for bad links. As you start to accumulate more and more posts on your site, this
quickly becomes an unworkable solution. Recognizing this, most of the online services offer a
more sophisticated service, whereby their software automatically loads the pages on your own
site (by following links), and checks the links on each of those pages. Although this is a much
better way of doing things, even automated checking of the links on every page of a large site
can take a considerable time—as much as a few hours. These services generally e-mail you the
results or a link to the results in a private area on their server. Not surprisingly, all the services
I have seen charge a fee for this more sophisticated checking. They often offer other services,
too, like checking your HTML for validity, checking your site for accessibility, and so on. Shop
around to find the deal that suits you best.
Using Desktop Link Checking Tools
An alternative to online link checking services is desktop link checking tools. One such tool
I came across is an extension for the Firefox web browser. If you are using this browser, you
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Figure 18-11. Link Valet report page
can install the LinkChecker extension (http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/),
by Kevin A. Freitas. This extension allows you to check the links on any page you are viewing.
After you install the extension into Firefox from Kevin’s site, you will have a new command
in the Tools menu: Check Page Links, as shown in Figure 18-12. Click this command,
and the extension will check the links in the page one at a time. As it checks each link, it will
highlight it to indicate its status. The colors used are green for a good link, red for broken links,
yellow for redirected or forbidden links, and gray for skipped links.
The extension also shows its progress in the Firefox status bar. Figure 18-13 shows this in
action. Notice that even the image header of the blog is highlighted, as it is a link to the main
page.
An advantage of the LinkChecker Firefox extension is that it is cross-platform. It will run
on any computer that Firefox runs on. The disadvantage of it is that, like the simple online services,
it checks only one page at a time. For a more sophisticated solution, you need to look at
stand-alone programs for your desktop. A number are available, of varying functionality and
quality. A good place to start looking is in Google’s directory, at http://directory.google.com/
Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Link_Management/.
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Figure 18-12. Starting the LinkChecker Firefox extension
Keeping Your Content Fresh
Along with search engines such as Google ranking fresh content highly, your readers will come
to expect that every time they come back to visit, they will have something new to read. You
can take several steps to help keep your content fresh.
Adding New Posts Regularly
One of the important things you can do to keep your community active is to add new posts
regularly. Try to get into the habit of posting regularly. It often doesn’t matter how often you
post, as long as it is on a regular basis. If you can update once a week, or perhaps every four
days, that sets a good pace.
Resist the temptation to post as often as possible. At first, you will probably be able to
sustain that pace, but as soon as it becomes too much work—and it will unless it is your fulltime
job—you will start skipping days. As soon as you do that, you start to disappoint your
readers, who will have come to expect very frequent new posts.
If you think of a lot of things to say ahead of schedule, save them in draft form for the time
when you don’t have anything new to say. If you are stuck for something new to say, it is worth
checking that your static pages are still up-to-date. For example, does the About page still
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Figure 18-13. The LinkChecker in progress
summarize what your site is about. If you have a policy page, does it still state your site policy?
If you do update any of these pages, make a post about that update, inviting feedback.
Seeking New Readers
Submit your site to related directories and special-interest sites. Politely invite people to your
site. Don’t spam those other sites; show respect for their owners, who are likely trying to build
their own readership. Always consider reciprocal links to sites that contain links to your site.
Keep abreast of new sites in your subject area. If new ones appear, visit them regularly to
see if they offer potential to gain you new visitors. Comment on their stories, and post your own
stories about the things they are discussing. Don’t forget to use WordPress’s Pingback and
TrackBack capabilities to create an automatic relationship between the stories. Visitors from
the other sites will come to read the stories on your site.
Keeping Your Site Interesting
Track your subject matter around the Web. Keep up-to-date with the changes in the field. It
may be that over time, the slant of your blog will change as people’s interests change or as your
chosen field develops. Be sure to update old articles as appropriate.
For instance, maybe you wrote a speculative piece last year and now some of the things
you speculated about have come to fruition. Write a new piece referencing the old article and
either blow your own trumpet about how you guessed right, or comment on how things turned
out if you got it wrong. It doesn’t actually matter whether you were right or wrong; if you write
interestingly about your subject, people will still read your post and comment on it.
Encouraging Contributors
If you can encourage some of your readers to contribute stories or articles, that is a great way
to get more content for your blog. If you do have guest authors, make sure you come to an
agreement over copyright and publishing rights. If they are writing explicitly for you, make
sure to allow them to quote or reproduce their articles on their own sites.
It can also be worth investigating republishing third-party articles (with appropriate permissions,
of course) as another source of new content. Many authors out there will be glad to
have a platform for their writings.
Maintaining Security
The best way to maintain your blog’s security is to keep up-to-date with WordPress releases.
You can check the postings listed in the Dashboard on your administration pages. Any new
releases, especially security fixes, will be noted there. If there are any new releases, the
announcement usually details the steps you need to take to update your blog. Invariably
with WordPress, the process is very simple.
It is also a good idea to check the home sites of any plug-ins and themes you have
installed. Perhaps once a month is often enough. Again, any new releases or security fixes
will be noted there.
CHAPTER 18 ■ MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 505
Summary
This chapter covered how to back up and restore your blog. I’ve given you tips on how to keep
your blog healthy and functioning. I’ve also given you some ideas on how to feed your blog—
how to keep it fresh and interesting for your readers.
My intention in these six chapters about WordPress was to show you how you can use it
to build an active and lively community centered on your interests. WordPress is a great tool
for self-publishing. It’s easy to shape to suit you and your readers.
If you aren’t already up and running with WordPress, your next step should be to find a
hosting service and go for it! Pick a subject you are passionate about, install WordPress, and
start blogging!