Gloson Blog – Social Media, Blogging, and Tech Tips from a Kid

This guest post is written by Peter Joseph, a 15-year-old blogger from Australia.

Often when we blog, at times there may be moments when we have absolutely no ideas on what to blog about.

The worst thing we can do is leave our blogs dormant. If we have nothing to blog about that people want to read then we will quickly lose readers, subscribers and worst, the grip on our blog.

If you have no idea what you want to blog about next, here are the best tips to avoid this and come up with blog posts ideas in seconds.

Photo by JJay

Don’t think of blogging as a must do

One heavy mistake everyone seems to make is they think that blogging is a must do.

They have a requirement that you must write a blog post at specific times on specific days or you will fall short of the cycle.

Only write a new post when you come up with a decent idea. It is better to leave your blog blank for a few more days then publish a blog post that isn’t of good quality and can put your readers off.

Here’s how to come up with post ideas in seconds and completely remove this step.

Photo by Jonno Witts

Start with the topic

The first thing you need to do to start coming up with ideas is to define your topic.

What actually do you plan to write on, is it blogging? Something about cooking?

Generally to get this far, it isn’t too hard, take a look on your blog, what topics does it cover; this is generally what you should write about and focus on in speed idea thinking.

Once you’ve done this, you need to start thinking up the catch phrase.

Photo by Ezu

Find out the catchphrase

Forget any form of creativity; all the catchphrase is, is a jumble of words which you are going to use to formulate your ideas.

Catch phrases can generally be very simple. Just make sure you remember to pull it back to your topic; just come up with anything at all.

Right now, for a catch phrase at this very instant, the thing I came up with as I write this is “blogging in a line”.

Now this might not sound like much at the moment but there are various different topics that could come around this catch phrase.

The next thing you need to do is formulate your catch phrase and come up with ideas around it.

Photo by ethangibbs808

Formulate everything around your catchphrase

Using my blogging in a line example, the next thing you need to do is formulate everything around your catch phrase.

What comes to mind when you think of “blogging in a line?”

To me, I think kof the importance of having multiple blog posts and moving them down into various parts, also making your posts flow concurrently so that everything works together.

What comes to mind with your catch phrase? Look at each of the different words in the sentence and then the whole sentence and ideas will quickly come to your head.

Photo by woodleywonderworks

Conclusion

After doing the tips above you will slowly realize how quickly coming up with blog post ideas is. No longer will you ever have to stress about meeting a post deadline with nothing to deliver.

Just remember now, all you have to do is think up a topic, find a catch phrase, formulate topics around it and you already have a perfect idea.

The idea behind this post took me around is seconds to think up, idea generate at that speed and you will save heaps of tine.

Only downside is. Now you have too many ideas and not enough time to write them all down.

This guest post is written by Onibalusi Bamidele, a 16-year-old entrepreneur.

More and more blogs are being created everyday. Since we have hundreds of millions of bloggers with more evolving everyday, there’s competition and only the best will survive.

To be successful, you need to know some things you can implement to make your blog a success. Below are 8 great and very important things every blogger must know.

1. Great Design Matters

With more blogs being added everyday, many blogs begin to look alike, and so you should stand out from the other blogs.

One of the most important things in an online presence is a great user experience, which design is part of.

If you have a unique and attractive design that gives a good user experience, it’ll be easy to promote your blog and gain loyal readers.

In blogging, many judge by design. No matter how great your content is, if they see a bad design, they conclude that your content is also bad without even reading.

Also, many skim blog posts. A very readable typography helps to encourage readers to read it instead of skimming it.

Photo: silkegb

2. Research and Write Valuable Content

With more blogs being added everyday, it is very important to make your blog stand out, not only by design but also by valuable content.

Many blog about “general blogging tips”. This might get you search engine traffic. But it also determines your blog’s growth and what kind of readers you gain.

When you write valuable content, your readers share your content with their friends, on their blogs, social media, etc.

Photo: Paul Watson

3. It Takes Being Creative

Many new bloggers say they’ve been blogging for some time, but are not seeing results. It’s very important to know that in blogging, you need to add your own spice of creavtivity to be successful. So, be creative.

You can be creative in so many ways:

• coming up with an topic nobody else had came up with
• the style of your writing
• the angle of your post
• how you promote your post

- It is all about doing something unusual, a little going out of the box.

Photo: Mrs Magic

4. Goals are Important

One very common thing I notice among bloggers is they lack goals. Many of them don’t set goals and wait for things to happen, and this continues to fuel their laziness.

One of the most important things you can do for yourself (not only in blogging, but in life in general) is to plan your future.

You should not just wait for things to happen but have a way you want it to happen.

It’s also important to set achievable goals using a time-frame. It’ll be unrealistic for a new blogger to say “I want 10,000 daily visitors in my first month!” An example of a good and realistic goal is, “I want to get 300 subscribers this month.”

And even though you might not achieve your goals, they would drive you toward working harder to take your blog to the next level.

Photo: Rigmarole

5. SEO Matters

Many bloggers obviously don’t know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and funny enough, some are not even ready to.

SEO is very important, so invest your time into learning a good deal about it. You might also want to hire an SEO expert if you’re not ready to learn it.

One SEO tip is get a good and fast wordpress theme because a clean code is easy for the bots to easily and properly crawl your blog.

Then you’ll get better page rankings and overall traffic (Also, Google’s ranking is now partly based on site loading speed).

Here’s a blog post I wrote on wordpress seo to get you started.

Photo: Danard Vincente

6. Promotion is a Must

It surprises me that my 1-month traffic surpasses the traffic of 4 months of a blogger who blogged for months before I knew what blogging was.

No matter how valuable your content is, you will still need to do some PUSH in order to get the desired traction.

You don’t just sit down, do nothing, and expect people to flock to your blog. Even if you think your content will go viral, you’ll still need some readers to give it a push before it does.

The number of readers you have can determine how successful you are. Traffic is a must. For more tips, please get my free ebook on how to get lots of free traffic.

Photo: roland

7. It Begins With Your Headline

Having personally suffered from this, I’ve also seen many bloggers with great content but nobody to read it. I figured out one of their major problems is: their headline sucks.

Yeah! No matter how great your content is, you should have a great headline to back it up.

So if you have a truly great content, you should make sure it goes viral by giving it the right and magnetic headline.

Spending a few minutes tweaking your headline might be what makes the difference. I’ve seen a fairly new blog go popular on StumbleUpon because it has a powerful headline.

So, never underestimate the power of an headline.

Photo: UnstablePixel

8. Networking is the Key

Yeah! Networking is very important to the success of any blogger.

Two or more can achieve far more than one. Networking with bloggers in your niche is very important to your success.

You can network with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs, writing for them (like what I’m doing here), and meeting on social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Sphinn Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.

Photo: Matt Hamm

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So, you’ve got a brand new wordpress blog!

Now what?

This post will tell you what you need to do after you start your wordpress blog.

If you already have a wordpress blog, you can still do these things if you haven’t done them yet .

So, here is my checklist of the 17 important things to do after starting your wordpress blog! Enjoy!

(Psst…If you’re thinking about why you should start a blog, >> 22 Reasons for You to Blog
And if you don’t use wordpress, click here to read about why you should use wordpress).

1. Decide whether you want to ‘www’ or not

If you have noticed, some blogs, like http://mashable.com/, don’t use the ‘www’ in their address. And some blogs, like http://www.techcrunch.com/, use the ‘www’.

So if you type http://www.mashable.com, it will redirect to http://mashable.com, and vice versa.

One advantage of having a www is your blog address will look more formal.

And if you don’t use the ‘www’, your address would be shorter.

To decide, go to yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-general.php and change both the ‘WordPress address’ and ‘Blog address’ to http://www.yourblog.com, or vice versa.

WWW Image by bull3t

2. Set up a feed so people can subscribe to your blog

If you are wondering what a blog feed is, it is a slimmed-down version of a blog that is created to be easily syndicated. You can subscribe to it using email or an RSS reader. A feed is represented by the orange RSS icon.

Many people prefer to get updates of your new blog posts through this easy way.

You can set one up at feedburner (Here’s how mine looks like). It’s free and easy! Just type in your blog address and click Burn Feed .

After that, set up email subscriptions, which enables your readers to subscribe by email. Go to Publicize >> Email Subscriptions in order to activate it and get the form.

Not setting up email subscriptions is a big mistake when it comes to getting subscribers to your blog because most people don’t know about RSS readers. Also, about 50% of my blog subscribers subscribe by email, so email subscriptions is a must!

After that, put the form and the RSS icon on your blog and link it to your feed at feedburner so people can subscribe.

3. Install Feedburner Feedsmith

Feedburner Feedsmith is a plugin that detects all ways to access your original wordpress feed and redirects them to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/yourfeed.

This plugin is needed for feedburner to track every possible subscriber to your blog by redirecting those who access http://www.yourblog.com/feed to feedburner. So, click here to install this plugin!

4. Subscribe to your own feed via RSS and email

It’s important to subscribe to your own feed, because it lets you see what your subscribers see, and when something is not right with your feed, you’ll notice. Besides, it boosts your subscriber count by 1 too . Hehe.

You can either use an RSS reader or email to subscribe to your feed, but it is best if you subscribe to both of them.

If you have a google account (which you most probably do – if you use Gmail, you have one), you can go to Google Reader. After logging in, click ‘Add a subscription’ and type in your blog address there.

5. Get your blog a favicon

A favicon is the icon you see next to your browser address bar and in your browser bookmarks. Gloson Blog’s favicon is .

It helps you brand your blog and also helps people locate your site more easily in their bookmarks.

To do this,

1. Create a square image and upload it to http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ to generate a favicon.

2. Download it and upload the .ico file it using an FTP client to /wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename.

3. Go to the wordpress administration area and then go to Appearance >> Editor.

4. Click on “header.php” to edit it.

5. Add this code on the line just before </head>:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename/favicon.ico" type="image/ico" />

(Be sure to replace ‘yourthemefilename’ with your theme file name )

6. Press Ctrl + F5 (Clear cache and reload) on your homepage. You should see it now!

6. Change the permalink structure

A permalink is the address of a blog post. This post’s permalink is http://www.glosonblog.com/17-important-things-to-do-after-starting-your-wordpress-blog/.

By default, the permalink structure is like this: http://yourblog.com/?p=123.

Instead of the post ID, I suggest changing it to http://yourblog.com/your-post-title in order to gain SEO benefits. Also, if  a visitor looks at it, he will know what the post is about before clicking it.

To do this, go to yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and then, type in   “/%postname%/” in Custom Structure.

Don’t worry about broken links because the default structure will redirect itself to the new structure .

For example, this post’s old permalink structure is http://www.glosonblog.com/?p=1833. Click it and see what happens .

Link photo by cindy47452

7. Write Your About Me page

An ‘About Me’ page is essential for every blog. When your readers are interested in your content, they want to know who wrote it. That’s when they go to the ‘About Me’ page.

Basically, it is just a page that tells who you are, what is your blog about, interesting things about you, and of course, a picture of yourself.

It really helps your readers to know you and your blog better! (Here’s my ‘About Me’ page by the way.)

8. Set up a contact form

A contact form is an professional and easy way for your readers to contact you. It also protects your email address from spammers.

There are some wordpress plugins that allow you to put up a contact form. I recommend Contact Form 7, a very popular contact form plugin.

After installing it, make a new page called ‘Contact’ and insert the form into it. (Here’s how it looks like on this blog )

9. and don’t forget the archive page too!

An archive page (here’s mine) is where people can find all the posts on your blog, from the first post to the latest post.

An archive page is important because it lets people discover your older content easily (and generate more pageviews).

To make an archive page, I recommend SRG Clean Archives, the one I’m using now. It’s clean and displays all your posts neatly.

If you are looking for a more creative and fun archive plugin, you should try Snazzy Archives, and here’s how it looks like.

10. Find a free theme and tweak it to make it unique

or hire someone to design it or design one yourself .

A theme (design) is really important to a blog because it represents the blog’s brand. Because if content is king, the design is the shiny robe and crown.

So I recommend you to find a not-so-common theme that you like. Then tweak it and make it a little (or better, a lot) different than the original.

One way is to change the structure of the theme by going to the Theme Editor (yourblog.com/wp-admin/theme-editor.php) in wordpress.

Another easier way is to change the images of the theme. The images are located in the theme’s folder.

After editing the images (like changing its color or texture), you can overwrite them to your blog using an FTP client like Filezilla.
(In the directory /wp-content/themes/yourthemefilename/images)

Be sure to press Ctrl + F5 to clear the cache to see the new design.

11. Set up your ping list

A ping list is a list of services that will be pinged each time you post. The services will notify sites and directories that you have posted a new post, thus giving you more exposure.

To set up your pinglist, go to the Update Services section in yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-writing.php.

And paste the sites you want to send a ping to. Note that the more pings you list, the more server resources your host has to use. So you might get suspended on a shared hosting if you use too much server resources.

This is a short recommended list of pings.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

12. Install Google Analytics (or any site stats counter you want)

Site statistics counters are important for you to monitor, analyze and study your blog’s traffic, so you can get to know your visitors better

I recommend Google Analytics, because it’s quite advanced and has lots of features. It’s free and all you need is a Google Account.

Google Analyticator, a wordpress plugin, allows you to easily add a Google Analytics tracking code.

Note: And please don’t become a stataholic! Write more posts!

13. Install WordPress DB Backup to schedule blog backups

WordPress Database Backup, a wordpress plugin, allows you to schedule blog backups (hourly, twice daily, daily, weekly) easily and have them automatically sent to you by email or stored in the server.

Backups are really important because if anything ever happens to your blog, you have the backup, your best defense.

14. Change the admin username

Most of the login usernames of wordpress blogs is ‘admin’. If your wordpress blog’s login username is ‘admin’, too, you should really change it to something that can’t be guessed easily because the default name makes hackers’ lives so much easier.

Changing it is super duper easy. Here are the steps to do it:

1. Go to the wordpress admin area.

2. Go to Users >> Add new

3. Fill in the details with a different username and give it administrator privileges.

4. Log out and log in with the new username.

5. Delete the ‘admin’ user.

6. When you do so, it will ask you whether you want to move the posts and links of ‘admin’ to another user or delete them. Attribute the posts to the new username you have just created.

Photo by Darwin Bell

15. Install the All-in-One-SEO Pack Plugin

All-in-One-SEO-Pack is a really popular wordpress plugin to do all the basic SEO things on your blog like page titles, post titles, meta tags, descriptions and those kinds of stuff. By default, the browser title of a wordpress blog post is:

Blog Title >> Blog Archive >> Post Title.

If you install All in One SEO, the structure will be changed to (or you can customize it):

Post Title | Blog Title

Which looks simply much better and shorter.

It also noindexes the date and category archives so that it won’t appear in search engine results pages and won’t receive duplicate content penalty.

16. Create your own 404 page

A 404 page is what your readers see when they go to a non-existing page on your blog. Like this: http://www.glosonblog.com/thispagedoesntexist.

By default, the page is just a ‘404 error – Page not Found’ 404 page that isn’t much help to your readers. Why not make it more helpful instead?

To do this, go to the wordpress admin area and then Appearance >> Editor. Click on 404.php to edit it.

Find the part of the code where it says <h2>404 Page Not Found</h2> or something like that. Then overwrite that line with this code (My version of a 404 page).

Be sure to make a backup of your old code before overwriting. It will probably work on most themes, but in some cases, it won’t, then you need to have a little bit of HTML knowledge in order to make it work.

<h2>404 Page Not Found</h2>
<p>Oopsie! The page you are looking for cannot be found! It might be renamed or removed. Please check your spelling or return to the homepage.</p>

<p>Or, you can also view our latest posts below. Hope you’ll enjoy them. Thanks! </p>

<p>
<h2>Latest Posts</h2></p>
<ul>
<?php
query_posts(‘posts_per_page=10′);
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Permalink for : <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
</ul>

Feel free to edit and customize the code! Do tell me if this code doesn’t work!

17. Write a post!

Still, without any content, a blog won’t be a blog.

So go on and write a post! Write a unique high-quality thought provoking post on a topic you are passionate about!

After that, promote it on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, and so on and on. Ask your friends to read it too!

Photo by KatieKrueger
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So here are my 17 things to do after starting a wordpress blog checklist. Be sure to bookmark this post and read it when you start a new wordpress blog!

If you know of another thing to do after starting a wordpress blog, please tell me in the comments!

And if you have any questions, please drop me a comment and I’ll be very glad to answer it!

If you have been visiting my blog in the last 3 weeks, you could see that it had a lot of errors and it was behaving weirdly. Here’s why.

My former host, Host Commando, ‘accidentally’ deleted my blog.

And in this post, I will tell you how I restored my blog completely. I did not backup my blog for about 1 month, really! I had to restore the posts and comments in 1 month manually, which I’m going to tell you how!

What Happened

1. Host Commando’s billing system went wrong

My father paid the fees for next month’s hosting. But somehow, their billing system went wrong and said that my father didn’t pay. Then, my account was suspended.

2. They said they ‘accidentally’ deleted my hosting account and all the files

My dad went to their office and told them the matter. They said they were working on some sort of ‘transferring-into-a-new-server’ process or something. They also said in the process, they ‘accidentally’ deleted the files in my account!

3. What happened

Then, I changed the DNS (Domain name servers) of Gloson Blog to point it to my older host, which was outdated (25 September 2009). That’s why you might have noticed that my blog lost October’s posts.

(I also lost the information of my affiliates and customers of my poetry book on my other site, Poetry Talents too.)

Oh, and as I said, and I didn’t make any backups during October, so all the posts in October were gone!

How I fixed it

How to transfer blog hosts in 7 steps

So, I bought a HostGator account. I transferred the files from my older host to HostGator. Here are the 7 steps which I used to successfully transfer the blog files from one host to another:

1. Use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin to backup the database of your older host and download the database backup file.

2. Download all the files of your blog in wp-content from an FTP client like Filezilla.

3. Point the Domain Name Servers (DNS) to the new host so you can create an addon domain. If you don’t know what DNS looks like, it looks like this:

ns2163.hostgator.com
ns2164.hostgator.com

4. Go to your new host’s cpanel and go to fantastico, the automatic wordpress installation tool, and install wordpress.

5. Upload the database backup file to phpmyadmin (to the correct database using the import feature) in cpanel.

6. Upload and overwrite all the wp-content files to the same folder in the new host using an FTP client.

7. After that, your posts and pages will be 404 pages. Log in to your wordpress and navigate to every sub page under ‘Settings’ until ‘Miscellaneous. I don’t know why, but it works!

But the problem wasn’t over yet… the blog was still outdated!

So I had to restore the posts, comments, and other changes manually that were made after the latest backup.

1. How I Restored Posts
Windows Live Writer
Luckily, I use Windows Live Writer (WLW) to write my posts. It stores all your blog posts in your computer.

So, I opened the October posts in my computer and edited the publish date to the date they were published. Then, I published them.

Luckily wordpress has this feature that allows you to edit posts dates! That means you can publish a post with the date set to 1st of January 2001! And if you set the posts to a future date, they will be published at that time.

How to edit publish dates in Windows Live Writer and WordPress

But..what if you didn’t use Windows Live Writer? Don’t worry, here are other methods.

Google Cache
You can also use Google Cache to get your lost posts (this works if only your posts are indexed).

Just type “cache:http://www.(yourblogaddress).com/(yourpost)/” in Google search and hopefully, you’ll get a cached version of your post of a particular date Google spidered your site.

Feed Reader
If you’ve subscribed to your own blog, that’s great! Because it lets you see how your other subscribers see your posts… and stores your posts in case you’ve lost them.

I subscribe to my blog via Google Reader. I’m not sure if this works for other readers but it probably would.

Just click your blog feed’s name and click ‘All items’. Your posts’ latest version will be displayed.

Email
If you subscribe to your own blog via email, you can retrieve it from there.

2. Restoring Comments
Here’s how I restored my precious comments.

If you choose to receive blog comment notifications, which I think most of you do, you’ll receive the comment with the author’s name, email, website, and the date of the comment.

All I had to do is post the comments with the author’s name, email, and website, and set the correct dates. Though, the IP addresses were mine.

Thank goodness wordpress also allows you to edit comment dates, so I can edit the time and date to when the comment was posted, which is the time and date the comment notification email is sent to you.

You can also use Google Cache to help you.

3. Uploaded images
I had to re-upload the images that were lost. Just upload them from your computer into where it was before.

4. Updated Gloson Blog’s layout
I also updated Gloson Blog’s layout. I did this by checking my blog in Google Cache. I could see how the sidebar looked like and what the differences are.

I’ve learned my lessons

1. Backup Your Blog Regularly
If you are blogging on a small blog and you are not posting often, I recommend you backup every week.

But when your blog gets popular and you post very often, you should backup everyday so that you won’t lose your precious posts and comments.

Now I decided to backup two times a week.

2. Have a Backup Hosting
You should get a free hosting where you can place all your files there. Free hosting can be unreliable and can have down times often but who cares? You just need a place to store your backups.

3. Think carefully before buying a cheap host
Even though it’s cheap, a cheap host’s quality may probably not be very good and have frequent downtimes and errors and poor customer support. So you’ll end up losing more if you buy a cheap host.

Instead, buy a popular blog host that is recommended by a lot of people. Their quality would probably be high.

What you should do to make sure your blog is safe

1. Backup often

I’ve now got an alarm that reminds me to backup my blog twice every week. To backup,

1. Use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin to backup your blog’s database.

2. Download the backup file.

3. Download all the files of your blog in wp-content.

And don’t forget to test your backups!

2. Subscribe to your blog

If you subscribe to your own blog by RSS or email, you’ll receive your blog posts and can restore them in case they are lost.

Besides, you should also subscribe to your own blog to see how your feed looks like for other subscribers, and whether there are errors in your feed.

3. Get comment notifications by email/Subscribe to your comments

This will make sure your precious comments are safe. Comments are very precious and is one of the best ways to bring a blog to life.

Where Gloson Blog is hosted now

Gloson Blog is now hosted on HostGator, which is probably going to be a good host as I had heard from many. I hope there will be no more problems this time. I hope that now Gloson Blog is much faster too!

What’s been going on last three weeks

You might have wondered why it took more than half a month for this process. Well, it was because I was writing and illustrating my new poetry book for kids in which the poems are to be sung to the tune of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’, which is done now.

__________

So I hope you understand what was going on on Gloson Blog and why it was behaving weirdly. I hope there are no more problems or bugs on Gloson Blog (If there are some, please tell me!). I hope Gloson Blog will be running smoothly again!

If you have anything to add to this post, or if you have any questions, please comment!

Update (19 March 2010): Hostgator has been the best hosting for me! Almost no downtimes at all! =)

More tips from rocking commentators below

Gerald Weber
Gloson,

I had an interesting experience where a silly hosting company erroneously canceled my  account. Ever since that incident I always make full backups which is easy simple to do. In cpanel click on backups, generate and then generate and download a full backup.

It will email you once the backup is complete and then you can FTP the full backup to your hard drive. This will backup EVERYTHING. Files database and the whole nine yards.

Now the good news is Hostgator make full backups on all their shared plans every Sunday. So as a fail safe you can always get a full backup from them from the most recent Sunday.

Glad you got your blog back together.

Marie Culver
I love Hostgator and I don’t doubt you will enjoy it too.

However, I wouldn’t recommend anybody depending on them or any other host to be responsible for backups. No matter how good the hosting is.

One, many hosts that include backup services have caveats, like file limits. Too many files or too large and you’re on your own. Hostgator has an “inode” limit (one file of any type equals one inode).

Two, even if a host gets back to you in an hour, that’s still an hour that your site is down when you could have fixed things yourself in a third of the time or less.

Three, there is no guarantee that a host backup is even that good or readily available. Sometimes files do get corrupted, you might need a backup right before the next backup cycle (you may have made many site changes by then), or if the host is having issues, your files are out with your site.

It’s better to take other steps and be able to verify that your backups are not only there, but viable for usage. An interesting site about backing up files is the Tao of Backup (taobackup.com). Ultimately it promotes a backup utility but it’s both entertaining and informative.

Marie Culver´s last blog ..I Love My Thesis