How to blog – series

A new series is going to appear on our site in the next few weeks and months called ‘how to Blog’ – it’s going to be the nuts and bolts of how to start your blog, choose a niche, the works.  We’re also going to be releasing it via autoresponder, so if you want to join in from the start, simply send an email to blogexpertise@aweber.com and we’ll get you set up.

Blogexpertise is the aweber list for this site, but also features a once monthly ‘uber’ newsletter.  Every three months, we’ll offer the best of the blog and that newsletter in download format, so no matter what you wnat, you’ll be able to find the information you need.

Backing up your blog

It’s important to back up your blog as regularly as you backup everything else – in  fact, if you can include backups of your websites and blogs with your own home backups that’s the most protection you can hope for.

Backing up your WordPress blog

Once you’ve designed your theme, you should download it and save it – downloading the whole of your wp-content folder periodically will also retain your plugins and any uploads you’ve made between backups.  I recommend using an FTP program and downloading the whole folder at least once a month.

That takes care of the core of your blog, but not your posts, so to do that I recommend that you use the ‘wordpress backup‘ plugin.  It’s simple enough that you can ’set and forget’ it – as long as you’re sure to check it occassionally.

You can check out more high and lo-tech ways to do so at the WordPress Codex.

How do we backup?

As you’ve probably seen from our first post, we didn’t actually keep backups, but on my other blogs, I use a combination of the WordPress Backup plugin and every month of content I add, I export the contents of my blog as XML.  I also download a backup of my sites every month, and run a backup system on the new server.

And you?

I’d love to hear how you backup your blog and what you’ve had success with – and what hasn’t worked.