Do any other WordPress users think that the All in One SEO Pack is updated too often? It is an excellent plugin that enhances the CMS really well, but I seem to be forever installing a new version. Why? Maybe I should ask the chaps over at Semper Fi Web Design.

Just spotted on a couple of blogs that I did an automatic update on that the Membership was set to “Anyone can register”. Luckily the default lever was subscriber.  There appears to be a cheeky bot out that signing up in the hope of finding a blog where membership is set higher by default. So if you have updated recently, uncheck “Anyone can register”, and consider a fresh download of 2.8.4 and refresh the files to remove the problem. That is assuming that the problem is fixed. On blogs that I have downloaded 2.8.4 for and then FTP’d to the server, this problem did not occur.

I have recently, not through choice, left the banking sector to become a full time, self employed web developer / content manager. I mentioned on Cre8asiteforums.com that I did not have a back up policy in place, and one of Cre8asiteforums’ mods, Iamlost, provided an excellent suggestion / explanation of the various back up options. Here it is:

You mentioned that you have tens of websites. And that you do not have a backup methodology. I believe you can see the catastrophic potential in those two sentences. I would point a whole litany of likely other problematic issues but those can wait for subsequent threads.

A webdev has two points needing backup: the production site (typically a web server) and the development site (typically on your home computer). The loss of a production site loses your revenue, similar to closing a B&M store. The loss of a development site loses planned alterations – wasted time and effort.

Whether and how you decide to backup either or both is personal choice. There are a number of methodology, hardware and software choices. Given your lack of techie knowledge I would suggest you start by developing and becoming familiar with backing up your own computer (your development computer). If you also hold a current copy of your live site(s) on that home computer then they too are backed up if your host(s) go(es) down. A 2-fer sale.

Note: at a later date you may want to investigate versioning.

There are two basic approaches to backups:

1. full backup plus differential backups.
2. full backup plus incremental backups.

A full backup is similar to a full inventory. Everything is backed up as of that point. Differential and incremental backups only backup the changes since the last full backup. Thus they are much faster and take much less room.

Each differential backup backs up back to the full backup point. Example: Full BU on Sunday, DBU on Monday backs up all changes since Sunday, DBU on Tuesday also backs up all changes since Sunday duplicating Mondays DBU and adding Tuesdays, and so on.

The first incremental backup backups up back to the full backup point but each subsequent IBU only backs up to prior IBU.

Thus if using full backup plus differential backups restoring involves two steps – first the last full backup and then the latest DBU. If using full backup plus incremental backups restoring involves 2n steps – first the last full backup and then each subsequent IBU in turn.

Often the reason for choosing between DBU or IBU is the frequency of backups.

Just to confuse you when you thought it was straightforward there are a whole suite of variations of those basics: synthetic full backup, multilevel incremental…

Fortunately there is plenty of software to choose from. Do your due diligence and then follow the directions. Wikipedia has a list – caveat emptor.

What I would recommend as basic best practice for development system is a full backup weekly with hourly incremental backups. That way the most you lose is an hours work. Granted the closer to week’s end a disaster the more SBU’s to cycle through but with most software that is automatic.

Further I would suggest backing up to a remote hard disk drive that can be removed and placed in a Faraday case in a fire rated safe or document chest when not working. Plus keeping a thumb drive with full backup and daily IBU copies that go home with you if working in an office.

Lots of personal choice and risk assessment opportunities when working for yourself.

This post has been edited by iamlost: 25th July 2009, 02:38 PM

DazzinDonna responded with a few gems:

1. Never ever rely on your host for backups. If your host gets mad at you and decides to dump you as a client, you’re toast. Yes, this happens. Many other things can go wrong as well, but that’s just an example.

2. Always have multiple backups. One at home, one in the clouds.

3. If your sites have any user generated content, you may want to back up the databases more frequently than once a day. But once a day is bare minimum. AT LEAST do that much.

No doubt there will be further discussion on this, so check this thread: cre8asiteforums.com: Backup For Peace Of Mind, Both Development and Production data

Automating backups is essential wherever possible, as the chances are if something goes wrong, that will be the day that you forgot / were too busy / went on holiday and do not have a backup available.

If on a shared server, then look at options for creating backups direct from your CMS (WordPress and Drupal for example have backup options). Also, as DazzilDonna suggests, make regular backups from the control panel of your webhost. If your host goes out of business then you may be in trouble if you rely on their backups. If you are running a simple site which has no user added content, and you make few updates, then the sensible option is to just backup whenever you make some changes. Many sites do not change from one week to the next. However, if you are running a blog, community, forum etc. then daily backups are essential.

The internet in unfortunately not a secure place, and viruses, Trojans, scams and phishers, fires and floods are all too common these days. And yes, I have once experienced major server downtime due to flooding! Not during my time in web development, but in banking! But if there was one thing that working in banking for over a decade taught me, it was to have a DRP – Disaster Recovery Plan.

Time to upgrade your WordPress installations. Need help? Let me know. Just FTP a backup to your pc, and backup the MySQL database, then hit the upgrade automatically button in the WordPress Dashboard and you’re away. Be patient while it ticks along. So, what’s new?

According the the official WordPress.org blog, these are the highlights:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. Upgrade 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Translation of role names fixed.
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title.
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported.
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed.
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed.
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload.
• Stricter inline style sanitization.
• Stricter menu security.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• RTL layout fixes

No excuses, get upgraded as soon as possible team!

For one of my sites I use some geotargeting code (plus a database of IP addresses) to show content to people in different countries – mostly for targeting adverts to the USA or UK in my case, but specific content can be shown to any country.

Now, unfortunately, I did not document exactly how I got mine working when I set it all up, but I do recall that I used some information from here: http://www.maxmind.com

- but I think that may have just been the free/open source country IP database. The other parts of the solution were taken from another site, specifically with the purpose of only showing Yahoo adverts to US readers. After doing a quick search, there are now several sites that provide these tutorials, and I cannot remember which, if any, I used. So here is my own little lesson on Geotrageting content.

For this solution to work you need to be able to parse php on your pages.

First, the following code needs to be placed in the body of on each page that you wish to place geotargeted content on:

<?php
/*
include(“geoip.inc”); // include the geoip functions
$geofile = geoip_open(“GeoIP.dat”,GEOIP_STANDARD);
echo geoip_country_code_by_addr($geofile, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
echo ” — “;
echo geoip_country_name_by_addr($geofile, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
geoip_close($geofile);
*/
include(“geoip.inc”); // include the geoip functions
$geofile = geoip_open(“GeoIP.dat”,GEOIP_STANDARD); // open the geoip data file
$cc = geoip_country_code_by_addr($geofile, $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
geoip_close($geofile); // close the data file
?>

The code to geotarget is like this – with some random ad rotator code added:

<?php
if($cc == “US”) {
// It’s a US visitor.
$ads = array(); // Start an array

$ads[] = ‘
Hello America
‘;
//Content 1

$ads[] = ‘
Howdy
‘;
//Content 2

//We have no added another. Now we will display the ad’s.
shuffle($ads);
// We will use the PHP function shuffle to randomise our advertisements.
echo $ads[0];
// We echo the first ad in the array. The array has been shuffled so the first ad will change.

} // end if US

elseif ($cc == “GB”) {
// It’s a GB visitor.
//Be sure to precede all “quotes” in the ad code with backslashes as shown in the example.
$ads = array(); // Start an array
$ads[] = ‘
Good morning, would you like some tea?
‘;
//Brits

$ads[] = ‘
How’s the weather?
‘;

//We have no added another. Now we will display the ad’s.
shuffle($ads);
// We will use the PHP function shuffle to randomise our advertisements.
echo $ads[0];
// We echo the first ad in the array. The array has been shuffled so the first ad will change.
} // end elseif GB

else {
//Be sure to precede all “quotes” in the ad code with backslashes as shown in the example.
echo ”
Rest of the world message
“;
} // end else
?>

In addition to this, you then also need two files in the directory that has pages that you are targetting (I wish I knew how to link direct to the files, as I duplicate these files all across my site!)

They are:
geoip.inc
GeoIP.dat

geoip.inc is here: link to file

and GeoIP.dat is the database that you can download from somewhere, like Maxmind.

I got all this for free from somewhere. I really wish that I bookmarked it at the time! Been using this for a year or so now. Nothing was paid for, all open source or provide free to use and share.

Hope it proves useful to someone!

I just discovered this neat little trick. I had to close down a subdomain as the CMS I was using was no longer being supported, and I could not afford a coder to fix my problems. So I places this in the .htaccess file in the root of the old subdomain:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webologist.co.uk/ [L,R=301]

Previously I was attempted to use the standard Redicect 301, but this did not work, as the file URL’s were redirected, causing 404 page not found errors. This code sorts it all out.

If you run a website with multiple RSS feeds it an be awkward to manage each feed individually. To make a feed successful, you need to get people to subscribe to the feed. Also, if you set up feed email notifications (there are many third party applications that do this, such as FeedBurner) then it is better to have all feeds combined. You cannot expect readers to sign up to every feed on your site.

Luckily Yahoo provide an excellent solution to this problem, with their Yahoo Pipes (beta) product. Yahoo Pipes is free to use, you just need a Yahoo! account. Although it is a relatively complex piece of software, it is actually very easy to set up a basic amalgamated feed.

In Yahoo’s words, “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.”

You can obviously add any feed you like to the Pipes, to create your own “superfeed” from your favourite websites. However the focus here is for Webmasters to learn how create an aggregated site feed.

How to make a simple aggregate feed with Yahoo Pipes:

Yahoo Pipes uses a simple drag a drop interface (see screenshot below). To make the feed, following these steps:

• Drag the “Fetch Feed” source to the work area. Paste in your feed URLs, adding extra URLs with the top left button. In the example below, three separate blogs one one domain are being aggregated to provide one feed.
• Add the Sort filter from the Operators (third menu item down). Chose item publication date, descending order.
• The Pipe Output will already be in the work area. To “pipe” the feeds, simply click on the button on the bottom of the Fetch Feed, and drag the cursor to the top of the Sort box. Then connect the Sort to the Pipe Output in the same way.
• Click Run Pipe (top middle, not in screenshot) and this will take you to your Pipe management page.
• In Pipe Management you can chose to publish the feed, and also set up the RSS URL, under the More Options Menu. You can also specify a URL for the Pipe Page, e.g. http://pipes.yahoo.com/motleyhealth/latest which is the MotleyHealth.com aggregated feed.

Yahoo Pipes in Action - Motleyhealth.com

In addition to providing the RSS, Yahoo Pipes allows you to embed a feed into a website by using the “Get as a Badge“. Here is an example of the Yahoo Pipes Badge embedded on a page. (Update – this seems to not work 100% of the time, will need to monitor, Not noticed any down time for the RSS itself, only the Yahoo Pipes Badge).

Or you can just use the RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=YML_Noyz3RGipS7UrLQIDg&_render=rss

There is a lot more to Yahoo Pipes than explained here, but this should provide a start for anyone wanting to publish a group of feeds together. Once the RSS URL is obtained, this can then be used with FeedBurner to great HTML feeds for websites, or set up email subscription services, and a whole lot of other things.

If you have used the Backup module on Drupal to backup up your site, then inside to the tar.gz file which contains all the web files, there will also be a slq.gz file which is a compressed version of your database.

One way to import this is using phpmyadmin. Simple go to the database you have created, and chose import, speificy the file, and hit “go”. However, there are often problems with phpmyadmin when importing larger files, i.e. it fails. If the import is successful, then it should report something like:

Import has been successfully finished, 630 queries executed.

However it has been known that for some larger files for php to fail. One thing that is often required is to increase the maximum upload file size in the php.ini configuration file. I have set my php upload file size to 26Mb, which is currently enough still; the last database that I uploaded using phpmyadmin was less than 2Mb. However, some popular, older site can have very large databases. For these, it may be better to use the mysql command line to import. I will go further into that later, once I have mastered the process myself.

For now, assuming that you have successfully inported the Drupal database using phpmyadmin, you should now have a copy of your Drupal installation. With this. you can install new modules, test, play, and upgrade, all without risk to harming your live version.

The main reason that I set out to make a copy of my Drupal installation was to then upgrade it, and check everything is working. There have been security warnings regarding older version of Drupal (5.2 is prone to MySQL attacks) and therefore I want to upgrade to 5.7. However, I did this for a new site (I actually built it using an old 5.2 download, then upgraded) but the forums failed to work afterwards. Something to do with MySQL settings / tables. I cannot afford my forums to die on my main Drupal site, so therefore, I need to practice too.

In the meantime, it is nice to know that I have a method to totally renew my Drupal installation incase of hackers bringing the site down. Sometimes once a hacker has got their hands on you database it is not easy, or even impossible, to fix. Often the only option is to drop the database and rebuild from backup., so ensure no other rogue code is hiding, causing havoc.

My current project is to learn to set up the whole Drupal installation again from scratch It is vital that anyone running a Drupal installation knows how to do this. I am currently learning it now, so will blog my progress.

There are four main reasons why you should know how to restore a Drupal installation:

1. If you upgrade your Drupal CMS to the latest version, it is advisable to create a copy that you can use if the upgrade goes disastrously wrong – i.e. you lose your database and old files.
2. If your server dies, or you decide to change webhost, then you will have to know how to do this, otherwise you will be paying someone a lot of money to install your Drupal CMS site for you.
3. If hackers destroy your site, you will need to be able to quickly revert to a previous saved version.
4. If you wish to create a test site of your Drupal installation, for testing new modules and templates, then making a copy is essential. Really your should never test in a live environment.

I seen several examples of one of the above happening at some point during my short time playing about on the web. I have seen a well respected SEO Forum disappear due to lack of backup. I have seen a Drupal install destroyed by hackers – at least the database was taken down, and with such a CMS, the database is everything.

So, how do you backup Drupal and then install?

Currently for backup, I am using a module which backs up all the files and the database into one tar.gz file. The easiest way to restore the files, is simply to FTP the gar.tz file to the server, then SSH using PuTTy to the command directory, and type in the command line:

tar -xvvzf drupalbackup.tar.gz

This will extract all the files, and also the drupal-backup.sql.gz

If you are only moving the location of you site, i.e. moving from domain1 to domain2, or from www.domain to subdomain.domain, then this is all that is actually required, as the same database will be used. Go to the new domain, and your site should be working as normal, just under a different name. Remember that now you have two domains using the same database.

Things to consider:

1. Ensure that you do not link to the site anywhere, and if you have Google Adsense on the site, remove it for now. If the search engines find the new site, then you will be penalised for having duplicate content. When not testing / using the site, put it into Site maintenance. If you are restoring a whole site after a host move, this is obviously not required.
2. Also remember that both domains are usign the same database at the moment, so don’t get excited and start installing and testing new modules yet!

However, if you lost your database, or have moved to a new host, then you will need to now extract and import the database files also. I have used phpmyadmin for importing database files in the past, but there are often problems for larger files. So I plan to master the mysql command line also, but first, I wish to see if I can do it with phpmyadmin.

First, in phpmyadmin, create a new database. Then, edit the Drupal config files to read the new database.

\sites\default\settings.php

IMPORTANT NOTE:
This file may have been set to read-only by the Drupal installation program. If you make changes to this file, be sure to protect it again after making your modifications. Failure to remove write permissions to this file is a security risk. i.e. it should be read–read–read, or 444.

The file only has two lines (apart from the comments, which make up most of the file).

$db_url = ‘mysql://account:password@localhost/dbname’;
$db_prefix = ”;

All you need to do is change he dbname to the newly created database that you have just made in phpmyadmin. The account and password will obviously be your MySQL account and password.

Be sure that you have uploaded your new settings.php file. As the file is set to read only, then you may not be able to simply FTP the new one over and replace. First, delete the file on the server. If you refresh your test/new website at this point, you will see “Unsupported database type” in the browser. On uploading the new settings.php file, and refreshing the browser, you should now see a blank page. This is proof that the database is not being read.

So, now we are ready to import the new database (the backup). Once this is done, you have a playground for testing, or a new permanent home for your site.

I decided the other day to try out Joomla, as there are a couple of modules which I think may be useful for a couple of my portal sites. However, so far I have found Joomla! to be a little problematic. I have installed Drupal on several sites now, and always with no problems at all. Just FTP the files to the server, set up a MySQL database, then open the browser and navigate to the domain, and from there everything is straight forward.

With Joomla things were not as simple. First of all I tried to install version 1.0.15 (full version) as this was the first one on the Joomla downloads page (I assumed that they had placed the latest stable release at the top of the list). I FTP’d it to my web host, and started to install it. Everything seemed to go fine, until I attempted to install a module. I navigated to the Administrator pages, then Installers > Modules. But I did not see the file browser box from here, just the same control panel menu with the 12 items (i.e. “Add New Content” to “Global config”). Not being able to install the one module that I really wanted to try out (endurancelog)caused me much frustration. I requested help and guidance on the Joomla forums, however I received no replies to my post.

By the time I had done some more investigations, I realised that there was a more recent stable release – Version 1.5.2. So I downloaded that, unzipped it on my pc and then FTP’s it to the server, using CoffeeCup Free FTP, as usual.

This time on attempting to install Joomla, I received a 404 error – something from /libraries was missing. Now I was suspicious of the upload. I soon realised that CoffeeCup Free FTP had failed me, and some files were missing from the upload. I made several more attempts to upload the Joomla directories, but kept getting the same problem in different directories. I decided that a more robust approach was required.

I knew that it was possible to install from the command line in Linux. I did attempt this, by accessing my server using PuTTY using wget, but the location came up as not recognised.

So I then moved to plan C. I FTP’d the zipped file (Joomla_1.5.2-Stable-Full_Package.zip) to my server, then unzipped it using the command line, i.e. I navigated to its location (var/www/domain/joomla/) and then simply typed “unzip Joomla_1.5.2-Stable-Full_Package.zip”. This unzipped the contents onto my server, and I was happy that no files could have been lost on the way. Still no idea why CoffeeCup lost some on the transfer. Never happened with Drupal.

OK, so I then I started to install it again (after dropping the previous MySQL database) and received two more errors, one about cookies, and another relating to the web server again, and permissions. This seemed odd, so I had an idea. I was using Firefox, so I decided to give it a go in IE. It worked. I finished the install, then downloaded the module that I wanted to try, and installed that using the administrator pages, and everything is up and running.

Still to test and configure, but at least the core of the site is working.

So, tips for installing Joomla. If you are struggling with strange errors, first upload a compressed version of the latest stable Joomla CMS. Then unzip it on the server using the command line, using PuTTy if you do not have a Linux OS at home. And then everything should be OK. And if you run into problems installing it using Firefox, use Internet Explorer. I may post a question on the forum asking why it did not work in FF, but probably will not bother them with it.

Now time to play and tinker with Joomla!