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

Yes, you have plucked up the courage to complete the little box at the end of the post. You have hit submit… What happens next?

If you have a web savvy blogmistress, you may get directed to a thank you page

Comments are the lifeblood of a blog, it encourages a community to form. Where you see comments (like on this blog) you know the advice is good.

So encouraging comments is something I am going to explore over the next few blog posts, and you can download them and try them and see which works for your blog. Remember, not everything works for everyone.

So back to thanking first time commenters, you can download the Comment Redirect plugin here

When installed, after the comment has been made it will redirect the commenter to another page. This can be where you thank them for taking the time to comment, encourage them to come back often and subscribe to your RSS feeds.

This isn’t the place for selling your ebooks or other products, but a welcoming page where your community starts to grow from. You will therefore need to create a New Page and then set that page in the Comment Redirect option under Plugins.

The great thing I like about this plugin is, your regular commenters won’t even notice it, so it won’t interfere with the smooth running of your blog, for your regulars it is business as usual.

As always, if you like this post – tell a few people and let us know how you get on with it

Sarah

Until you’re really familiar with the workings of WordPress, one frustrating issue may be the default title of your links, if you choose to show those in your sidebar, you might want to call them something different, or indeed have several categories.

To change your “blogroll”, from your Dashboard go to Links, Link Categories. Here you can Edit the Blogroll as well as add new link categories.

Do get in touch if you want further guidance or have any questions – we’re happy to help!

Only last month I came across Chris Garrett’s ebook on Guest Posting. I enjoyed and recommend his work with Problogger and like their style. So was happy to buy Chris’ ebook to review for this month’s Guest Posting initiative.

What Chris’s ebook does is take you through all you need to know, in an easy to read manner, about guest posting. Why it’s such a good idea, what to look out for, how to go about it. Pretty much all you need if you want to explore this great way to get your name out there. And it is a useful, genuine way to build some good links to your own blog and website.

Chris does not faff about, he gives you what you need to know to get on with it – that’s my kind of ebook! And then he gently follows through with more information – not by sending you emails all the time, but just with something useful a couple of days later. What I consider a very British approach to such things and one that I approve of and enjoy!

If you do buy this book and then want somewhere to guest post, pop me an email to hello@blogmistress.com and we’ll see if we can suggest a good blog for you to guest post upon, if ours is not relevant.

Babs

This post is to all those out there in the big wide world of Wordpress that code plugins…

How do you name them?

The other day I was reading and loving Joe’s post about the Hottie McFoxy dashboard plugin, but it turns out if you read the post that it isn’t actually called a hottie mcfoxy dashboard plugin at all, it has a rather dull name that I can’t recall for love nor money. Which got me thinking about how I search for plugins and what I actually find for my efforts.

Looking for – a diary of blog posts scheduled and what I get is this…. pre-date-future-post not what I was looking for at all, but I am sure it does whatever it does very nicely, it’s just doesn’t help me… what I was really looking for was Calendar by Kieran O Shea . It did not cross my mind it would be called a calendar. A Calendar goes on the wall doesn’t it? What about a schedule? Err, nope. Not that either. In fact the list of plugins under schedule blogs seems to have  nothing at all to do with scheduling blogs!

I like to do my follow Fridays for twitter in a blog, so I was looking for the holy grail of plugins – I was looking for a fabled plugin that does something that really will make my life easier, the plugin that hyperlinks twitter names. Could I find it? I could find that Grail quicker! I stumbled across the actual plugin by accident after searching through a pile of plugins that pulled my tweets into the blogs, sent my blogs to twitter and all sorts of things, it was more luck than judgment that I found the easy twitter link plugin!

So back to my original question… how do you name a plugin? Do you give thought to non technical minded people looking for your excellently coded piece of Wordpress perfection? or is it something else?

Sarah