This is a short and simple post, consider it a best practices for blogging and website management in general. Back up all of your article and your uploads very frequently. The best looking design in the world doesn’t mean anything if your carefully tweaked theme is erased by a errant keystroke. This article will focus on WordPress installs because its what I am most familiar with. For Drupal, Joomla, or hosted blogs your mileage will vary but the sentiment remains the same.

The entirety of the Caffination Podcast as you see it right now has disappeared twice so far, both my fault. Just a tip when your blog asks you “are you sure?” Make sure that you are. But because i had backups running it was only down for a total of 30 minutes between the two mistakes. I have never had a catastrophic hardware failure on the server level, I have never lost all of the files on the server, failed to pay a bill and had my account closed or anything like that but you get the drift. Read the rest of this entry »