A beginners guide to breaking your blog

As you know I don’t speak fluent geek just yet (I need lots of practice), so I shall just come right out and say it… have you ever broken your blog? Babs aka Blogmistress must despair of me, as I am always breaking them.

The first time I did it, I resolved that one myself, I called the hosting company in California and asked them to reset my blog to it’s last back up point (it was backed up every 24 hours with this host), and everything was restored, phew! I just wish they were all that easy to fix!

The second time, I learned I needed to back up… and I lost all my content, all my comments etc, my blog still does look a shadow of it’s former self

There really is no excuse not to back up your blog, just have a quick look at how many plugins are available to keep your data safe…

Some will back up your blog and send you an email with the data, so you can give this to your blogmistress to get it restored if like me you can’t do it yourself. If you have a lot of content, think how you will replace that if the worst case scenario happens, you could land up losing the whole lot if you are not careful.

Breaking your blog isn’t limited to the things you can inflict upon it, oh no, there are ways to break it without even realising it!

Try upgrading your WordPress to the latest version without doing what the Blogmistress tells you and guess what, no blog – just the white wall of death (AKA as white wall of doom or as it’s popularly called in this house OMFG what have I done…).

Upgrading a plugin can also have a detrimental effect along with changing from one theme to another. Although you may like the fact that some plugins make your blog super fabulous and fast, the theme you love may conflict with it and one of them will have to go… you will only find out when your viewings go down or you do some cross browser testing, or your blog just plain stops working

The image for this blog is a cat sitting on a laptop, that was no accident. My laptop is at the dining table, I have had cats knock cans of Pepsi Max into the keyboard and whole blog posts erased when they have tried to cross the laptop when I am not looking. The cats walking across the keyboard I can semi cope with, using the Lazarus form recovery tool in Firefox. The cats have broke at least 3 of my blogs. Watch out for outside influences.

As I type this I notice that I called this the beginners guide to breaking your blog when actually I am quite an expert at it!

What have I missed – any that I have yet to try?

Sarah