A few years ago I wrote a post about Pingdom.  (See below for a copy of the post.)  Pingdom monitors your websites to make sure they’re up and running.  It’s a great service and I still use them today.  I see that they now offer a free account for monitoring one website or server.

Is My Website Up?

Years ago I had a web host that wasn’t very concerned about keeping my websites up and running.  Their servers would go down once a month.  This didn’t seem to bother them at all.  They also seemed pretty easy going about getting things back up.  Sometimes my websites would be back up and running in a few hours sometimes it took as long as a day.

I moved my sites to another web host but I still bare the emotional scars of that experience.  I’m really a very friendly, calm person but show me a downed website and my blood pressure rises.  If the host is having a problem they’d better figure it out.  Pronto!  Once the site is back up I want to know what happened and what their plans are for making sure it never happens again!!!!  And by that I mean I want it to NEVER happen again!

One of the things that gets me through my emotional distress in this area is my website monitoring service.  I use Pingdom but there are a lot of other services out there.  Website monitoring services have computers that check their customer’s websites.  If a site is down they’ll send you an email.  Most services also send you an email when they find your site is back up.  Then you know just how long your website was down.

It’s a great service that helps you have peace of mind about the reliability of your website.

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Earlier I explained how to prepare for your update by backing up your files.  Now it’s time to actually do the the update.  Are you nervous?  Don’t be.  Updating WordPress is amazingly easy.

Log into your dashboard.  You’ll see the “Please update now” message at the top of the screen.

Click on “Please update now.”  Then you’ll go to the upgrade screen.  You may see not one, but two sections.  The top section will deal with upgrading your WordPress software.  The second screen will deal with upgrading your plugins.  Right now we’re going to focus on updating your WordPress software.

You’ll see a message about backing up your database.  You’ve read part one of this tutorial and so you have that covered.  Click on the “Upgrade Automatically” button.

WordPress will do it’s thing and in a few seconds to a few minutes (it depends on your website host) you’ll see the success message.

And that’s it.  Pesto chango you’ve upgraded your WordPress software!

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How do you upgrade your WordPress software?  The upgrade itself is easy and will be addressed in Part Two of this series.  However, before you upgrade you should backup what you’ve got now.  This is just in case something goes hideously and horribly wrong.  Will anything go hideously and horribly wrong?  Probably not.  I’ve updated loads of sites on loads of website hosts.   98% of the time things work great.  Just the same, I highly recommend you make a backup.

Backing up Posts, Comments and WordPress Settings

The backup can be divided into two parts.  The first part is easy.   Let’s start with backing up your database.  To do that go to Plugins > Add New and get the WP-DB-Backup plugin.  (Here’s a post on how to install a plugin.)

Once the backup plugin is installed, click on Tools > Backup.

Here are the files that I backup:

In the Backup Options section click on “Download to your computer”.  Then click on “Backup now!”   You’ll see something like the below.

When it’s done, just download the backup to your computer.  Think of it like insurance for your blog.  The backups are handy to have just in case the upgrade fails or in case your blog gets hacked.

Backing up WordPress Configuration Files, Themes and Photos

In order to backup your customized theme, photos you’ve uploaded and the files that make WordPress run you’ll need to do something called FTP.  FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.   If this sounds scary to you, you’re not alone.  The thought of file wrangling makes most people nervous.   Here’s how you get around that:

• If you’re my customer – Call me and we’ll chat about this before you update your software.  I’ll deal with all that nasty FTP business for you.  We’ll discuss how often I should make backups of your site.
• If you bought my book - The book has a detailed explanation of how to FTP using the tools at BlueHost.
• Call your website host – Most website hosts have tools that help you with FTP.  Call them and ask them to coach you through the process.

If the sound of terms like “FTP” and “file folder structure” don’t make you nervous then you might get yourself an FTP program like FileZilla or WS_FTP Pro.  Both are user-friendly and will allow you to make a backup of all your WordPress files.

Now that you’re totally backed up, it’s time for the actual WordPress software upgrade.  I’ll talk about that in Part Two of Updating WordPress.

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A customer came to me with an Etomite driven website that needed an upgrade. Etomite is a CMS (Content Management System) that helps people maintain and publish their websites.  Etomite isn’t the most difficult system to use, but it’s not really user friendly.  So I convinced the customer to switch to a different CMS.  I also:

• Made the existing design wider to get more content above the fold
• Switched the navigation to a horizontal system to make it easier for customers to find products

While I made technical changes, the customer updated almost all the content.  The result is a significantly better website in terms of usability and functionality.

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You have until tomorrow to cast your votes in the 2010 Bloggies competition.  Even if you don’t vote, you’ll want to check it out.  You’ll get ideas for your own blog and find some terrific sites.

Many of the nominated blogs relate to food or cooking.  While there is a special category for food blogs, they’re also featured in other categories.  They’re represented in  the Best Asian, Best European, Best Latin American and Best Canadian blog groups.   And that’s just some of the places you’ll find food blogs.

I was happy to see a few of my old favorites.  Cake Wrecks is always a hoot and I visit Pioneer Woman every day.  I also found new blogs that I enjoyed.  Frog Ponds Rock has beautiful photos and I may have actually drooled while looking at Everybody Likes Sandwiches.

So check out the 2010 bloggies.  It’ll be fun maybe one day your blog will be among the chosen.

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Have you been watching the news from Haiti?  It’s heart breaking.

If you have a WordPress blog  you can add links to aid organizations (via the text widget) to the sidebar of your blog.  I’ve added one to the right side of this page.

To find the code to add, find your favorite charity site.  In this case I used Mercy Corps.  Then I looked for a page that told how to link to their site.  The page I found had many ad sizes to chose from.

Sometimes the pages are more difficult to find.  I found a similar page for the American Red Cross by looking through their media resources area.

Having a website or a blog gives us alternate ways to make contact with the rest of the world.  It also gives us alternate ways to lend a hand.

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I finally had the opportunity to take the new WordPress photo editor for a spin.  For those of you that haven’t heard, the built-in photo editor was one of the new features in WordPress 2.9.

I was most interested in its resizing capability.  I see a lot of people uploading huge photos that make their sites painfully slow to load.  Even if they’re able to make the photo appear small, the download time is still way, way long.

To resize a photo simply upload a photo like normal.

You’ll notice a new “Edit image” button.

Click on “Edit image” and then click “Scale Image”.

That section will expand and you’ll be able to resize the image.  Enter the desired width in the first box.  WordPress will fill in the second box with the appropriate height for that width.

If you don’t know how wide your images should be, you may need to experiment.  To give you some idea of the sizing, all the images in this post are 450 pixels wide.

From there you insert the image into the post just like normal.  Here is the photo that I resized.  If you’re concerned about image quality click here to see the original (way too big) image.

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If you have a Twitter page, there’s no reason why it can’t be personalized to match your website.  Yes, there are design constraints but it’s still possible to make a Twitter page that stands out from the crowd.

Here’s an example.  LitQuotes is a quotations website.  Their website looks like this:

The new LitQuotes Twitter page shares the look and feel of the main website.  It also gives followers more information about LitQuotes.

Contact us if you need help making your Twitter page stand out from the crowd.

Happy tweeting!

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WordPress 2.9.1 has been released.  It fixes the RSS widget issue that I was concerned about.  So for any of my customers that have been holding off updating until that issue was resolved . . .  update away.

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