BackupBuddy

As popular as it is WordPress still has it’s quirks. With all the one click installs and ready made themes when you need to do something more technical it can be scary.

There is a huge amount of help available from the likes of WP-Beginner to WordPress.tv, but when things go wrong it can be tough. After all you built a blog to share content, you’re a writer, not a programmer, and solving technical issues can be a pain.

Even though I have a pretty good technical knowledge of WordPress the one area that still frustrates me is moving sites from one server to another. Or more typically when I want to build a WordPress site on my local machine then transfer it to a live server, when it’s ready to launch.

There is a step by step method to follow that is quite straightforward, but it’s drawn out and time consuming, and if something does go wrong it can be time consuming to recover things and start over. If I am producing a site for someone else, or even producing a new site for myself, I want to get through the production process a simply as possible.

Recently, I had exactly this issue. Wanting to develop the blog locally and test it before transferring to a live server. This how I discovered a paid for plugin called BackupBuddy that seems to have answered all of my requirements. Like most bloggers I try to do as much for free as possible, but knowing how much of a time saver this plugin could be, not just this time but in the future too, I stuck my hand in my pocket.

As implied by it’s name BackupBuddy can create backup copies of your WordPress site, but it doesn’t just do that. It also allows you to copy a web site from one location and migrate it to another server, even with a different domain name and database in just a few clicks.

This is a paid for plugin but for me it is such a time saver it’s worth every cent of it’s $75.

You simply install the plugin on your current site, click a button to create a back up, then click migrate. Upload the backup file and migration file it creates to your new server; ensure there is a working database in place, run the migration file and your new site is up and running again in a matter of minutes.

To see how easy it is watch the video below:

BackupBuddy from WebDesign.com on Vimeo.

A new release for WordPress is due shortly. The WordPress 3.1 update will see the addition of easy linking to existing posts, rather than having to find the post and paste in the URL there will be a menu option to select the post or page to link to for easy inclusion.

TinyMCE is the WYSIWYG editor that allows you to format posts, there was a new version released earlier in the year which had improvements and this is to be included. The forgotten password work-flow is also to be simplified, allowing users to enter a custom password and cut down on the email notifications sent.

One of the more controversial additions is the Admin Bar similar to the administration bar you find on a WordPress.com site. In itself the Admin Bar may prove quite useful, but it is the omission of any built-in functionality that allows you to turn it off or disable it that is likely to raise comment. In testing the Admin Bar has been found to break some Themes, to this end the following video takes you through 2 options that allow you to remove or disable the Admin Bar in WordPress 3.1.

Any feedback, questions or comments welcome below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOaeFxLNrE8

In the first part of How to Publish Your Worpdress Blog Post from Anywhere we covered using Markdown to enable you write blog posts quickly without having to rework them for formatting. Using Markdown will certainly sped up your ability to post articles on your blog but WordPress, by default, cannot interpret Markdown. Therefore we need to install a plugin which will help WordPress do just that.

The Markdown for WordPress plugin is freely available and easy to install. The video below will take you through the complete process of installing and using the Markdown for WordPress plugin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdnyASGiJKs

When writing a blog post your concentration should always be on the content and quality of what you are producing. You will be writing the post to attract new customers, excite your readers or express your expertise in a particular field. Taking time formatting your post will detract from achieving your goals. In this three part series I will take you through an easy way to write your posts without having to worry about HTML, the application you write with or spending unnecessary time reworking your post. In addition I will show you how you can publish a blog post to [Wordpress][wp] from virtually anywhere regardless of the platform you are using, as long as you have access to the Internet and email, your post can be published.

In the first part we are going to look at how you can write a post independent of platform or application and still have it in a format that could be used on the Web. To achieve this we use something called [Markdown][md].

[Markdown][md] was invented by [John Gruber][jg], it provides an easy way to write, read and edit text without having to worry about complex [HTML][html] or the quirks of [Microsoft Word][word] and other word processing applications getting in the way. With Markdown you can write naturally and using easy to recall syntax, format your text as you type. The text remains easy to read and edit and and can be posted direct to the web.

So what does Markdown consist of? Let’s run through some basic syntax:

In HTML headings are referred to with the syntax:

Heading

Heading 2

Heading 3

and so on.

In Markdown:

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3

For bold and italic text:

**bold** instead of bold
*italic* instead of italic

Lists are very easy:

* list item
* another list item
* and another

Negating the need for:

• list item
• another list item
• and another

Numbered lists are even easier to read:

1. item 1
2. item 2
3. item 3

My favourite time saver of all time is for links. Not only are these time consuming to type in HTML but easy to miss-type and hard to read in a long document. With Markdown links you can reference them all at the foot of the document.

[This is a link][link1]
[Another link][link2]
[This links to link 1 too][link1]

Then at the end of the document you would list all your links and references:

[link1]: http://link1.com
[link2]: http://link2.com

Here you can find a full list of the [Markdown Syntax][syntax]. For now have a play with it, see if you find it easier to use than HTML and in the next post I will show you how you can use Markdown in [Wordpress][wp].

[wp]: http://wordpress.org
[md]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[jg]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
[html]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html
[word]: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/
[syntax]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

This week saw the launch of our new look website at work Adnams.co.uk. A proud moment for me as it was the culmination of 6 months of work involving many different people within the company. It was also based on a vision of allowing customers to easily move from one sector of the business to another online. Exposing parts of the business to them that they may not necessarily have been aware of. Allowing them to communicate with the company easily and through many touch points. Using images, video and the written word to express the essence of the company.

Internally it was to also give employees a voice, allowing them to highlight their experiences, express their passion and present their opinion. Of course there is commercial intent but it is more than that, it is an attempt at creating an experience that extends beyond the visit to the local pub, a trip to Southwold or the act of purchasing wine in one of our shops.

Did we succeed? Maybe, time will tell, but it’s not the technology that is going to get us there. WordPress was the base of the site. It was heavily themed and customised with plugins of various types to allow us to structure content the way we wanted, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter integrated to bring content from other channels. And it will be the content that drives the success; structure and design can only provide so much.

A lot of the reason I write this blog is to remind myself how important content is. How difficult it can be to produce, to maintain consistency and quality. Often we run off to build the next Google only to realise that without the content Google is just a logo and a search box on the screen.

In my next video guide to the non-technical way of setting up a WordPress blog I introduce you to installing WordPress plugins. The three I have chosen for this demonstration enable you to install Google Analytics, create Google XML site maps and further improve the Search Engine Optimisation of your blog.

Any questions please feel free to comment below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4rq4JvQYVo

Video Transcription

Hi, welcome back. I’m Sean Clark and this is the next installment of setting up your WordPress blog. No technical knowledge required. None at all.

Now, last time we looked at installing a Akismet to help you prevent comment spam. If you missed that one, check out my blog where you’ll find this video. Now, we’re gonna look at three more plugins which we find very useful to install before we get going. Now, all we’re gonna do today is show you how easy they are to install and then in a future episode, I will show you how to configure them all, the ones that need configuring. Let’s get on and install these plugins. Very, very easy.
Okay, on the left hand side here, we have the plugins menu. From the drop-down, we go to ‘Add New’ and the first one we’re gonna look for is a ‘google analytics’ plugin. Now, this allows you to keep track of all the visitors on your site and is a very easy way to install the free tracking software ‘google analytics’. Very comprehensive, Google Analytics in itself can do with a whole series of videos just showing how to use and understand it. We don’t need to go that deep, we’re going to install the plugin and then i’ll show you in the future how to get up and running with Google Analytics and some of the basic stuff on how to keep any eye on who is coming to your site and how you’re getting there.

Anyway, installation. All we do to install a plugin is, on the right hand side click install and it gives you a popup, click install now. That’s it, no need to activate the plugin at the moment. A few bits we need to do before that. We’re just gonna install them today. On with the next plugin. The next one is another Google plugin and this one allows us to produce what’s called an XML site map. This allows Google to see content as it changes on your site and is a really really good plugin. Saves you having to do any technical stuff, it’s literally install and go.

By the way, this also creates files compatible with other major search engines as well so that they can see when you update your site and come back and crawl your site for new content. So we’ll search plugins for this. There it is, make sure it’s the correct one. install now. There we go, plugin installed.

And the final one for today is something called all in one SEO pack. Now, wordpress is no.1 choice for a lot of bloggers because it is SEO, search engine, friendly out of the box. All in one SEO pack has some extra unique features allowing you to customise search engine optimisation, you’re not going to need that but nice to have it installed from day one so we can do some bits and pieces if and when you want to.

So, again, we click on install then install now and there we go. We can go here to see the installed plugins. We have at this moment all installed. All in one SEO pack, Google Aalyticator, Google XML sitemaps and Hello Dolly which nobody uses but is a nice little jokey one that sits in there as standard from wordpress. so, that’s it. That is how you install plugins and as you probably saw when I was installing those there are hundreds and hundreds of plugins and if you’re doing some specialist stuff you may want a type of plugin to do something like display a twitter feed or display some video/audio or some other sort of content on the site. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of those type of plugins available and you just search for them within WordPress, very very easy. It’s best not to get too wrapped up in them. As it’s easy to get diverted. Really what I’ve put in there is the absolute essentials and all you need to get you started.

So, until next time, if you have any comments then please comment on the blog or you can catch me on twitter.com/seaneclark or you can email me. info@seanclark.com. OK see you soon.

End of Video Transcription

When starting out a blog there is nothing more disheartening than to think you have just received lots of comments on your last blog post only to find that most of them are spam!

Although it takes time to build traffic to your new blog for some reason spammers have no trouble finding it at all. In the following tutorial I take you through the process of setting up the Akismet plugin that helps prevent spam comments. It comes already installed with WordPress and takes only a few minutes to configure, but will save you lots of wasted time later on managing spam comments.

If you have any comments or questions on this video please feel free to leave them below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr-D5KrTNW4

Video Transcription

Welcome back! I’m Sean Clark and I’m continuing my series of showing you how to install WordPress for small businesses. Now this week we are looking at plugins. But rather than go through a whole traunch of plugins you can’t actually use I have a line up of selected plugins, that I believe are the best ones you need just to get started.

But today is a special day in terms of plugins, because we’re gonna devote this recording to just the one plugin. In my view setting up this plugin will save you so much time and so much grief, that it’s probably worth spending the time on it and making sure we set this up properly.

It also has a few extra steps that we don’t usually find in other plugin setups. So, if we come over to the left hand side. On our WordPress dashboard we have a plugins menu. So if we click on that and open that up we have three options here. Installed, Add New and Editor.

Okay, now, the plugin that we’re after actually comes pre-installed with WordPress by default. Which I think shows how actually relevant and required this plugin can be. And this is the Akismet plugin.And what this plugin actually does is prevent, as well as it can, spam comments from hitting your blog. Now believe me if you haven’t got some sort of protection against spam comments, you will spend half your time deleting them off the site and trying to control and manage spam comments, instead of the real job of posting stuff to your site. So by having this set up properly it’s going to save you a lot of time.

So before we go ahead and click Activate, there is one thing that we actually need before we can use this. And it’s called an API key. And we can easily get one of those by just clicking the link here. This will take you to Akismet site, which is all part of WordPress. So, we’re going to put in an e-mail address I can associate with the site here. And we’re going to give it a username and we’ll go for colchesterantiques, seeing as that is the name of the site. Yes, we’ve read the agreement. Now, before you actually get your API key this will actually send you and e-mail, so you can confirm your e-mail address. So make sure the e-mail address you use is actually a real e-mail address, because you will need that to be able to to get your key. So I’m going to click the Next button here. Then we’ll wait for the e-mail to come through and I’ll be back to take you through the next steps.

Okay, we’re back. Now Akismet has sent me the link by which I need to activate my account. So we’re going to click on that now to activate the account. And there we go. There we have it. I have now been given my API key. I can now copy this, so we copy the API key, then we’ll nip back over to our Colchester Antiques website. Back to the admin. Go back to my Plugins page here, where we have Akismet installed. We now click on Activate. Now up the top, once it says activated, it says you must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work. So we click on that link. And we have this space here, where I can paste in my API key. Automatically discard spam comments. Yep, we’ll do that, on posts older than a month. A little less for us to manage. And then I update Options. That is it. Job done. So if we go back to the Plugins page you’ll see our Akismet plugin is active. We have an API key in and now we don’t have to worry about any spam comments. Now the odd few still get through, but I think you’ll find, for a free service, it is a really, really good timesaver.

We’ll look at a few more plugins next time and if you have any questions then you can either catch me on Twitter, seanEclark, or comment on my blog at SeanClark.com and will be sure to get back to you. Okay, see you next time. Thank you.

End of Video Transcription

Last time I showed you how to easily install WordPress in under 3 minutes, in the following video I will guide you through 5 basic steps for configuring your blog. These steps ensure your WordPress install is upto date, that important information is visible and that your blog is ready to be found in the search engines.

As with all my guides no technical knowledge is required, perfect for SME’s. If you have any questions or comments please leave a note below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1kMbL8Wapk

Video Transcription:

Hi!

I’m Sean Clark and welcome back to the second in the series of Installing a WordPress blog for Small Businesses.

No technical knowledge required.

OK, last week we showed you how to install a WordPress blog, just through a few simple and easy clicks and this week we’re going to do some basic configuration before we get started with a more complex stuff and get blogging underway.

So, just a few tidy ups and configuration to do today.

The first thing you may notice is that when you install your WordPress blog, it says there’s an update available.

This is because many of the servers will not have the latest version of WordPress installed when they provide you with it through Fantastico.

WordPress recognizes that they haven’t got the lastest install and let you know via this message.

So, we’re just going to run through and update the install.

Just click there.

Now, you should really backup your database and files, but because this is a totally clean install we have added nothing; no posts, no images, we’re not going to bother to do that backup.

But, I will show you how to do a backup in a later tutorial.

So, we click Upgrade Automatically and we let WordPress get on and do it’s thing.

It will now download the newer version and then run through a few things, and it’s done!

That’s it!

That’s how quick it will actually install and update itself.

Now, the next thing we need to do is just tidy up what we call the Dashboard.

This is you’re control panel; it shows you what’s going on in your blog…since you last logged in.

And a few things on here we don’t really need to know.

I like to keep the Right Now panel, which is this first tick box, here, and it shows a few bits of information I like to keep an eye on.

Recent Comments; I like to see if there is any new comments since I last logged in.

And, we’lll keep an eye on Incoming Links as well.

Plug Ins; now I don’t need to know what the latest Plug Ins are.

Quick Press; this little box here that enables you to quickly put up a post…I rarely use this and I usually turn that off.

I will keep Recent Drafts in case I’ve finished something halfway through and then decided I need to go do something, this will remind me that there is something there I need to finish up, so we’ll leave that there.

WordPress Development News, don’t need that and I don’t need any other WordPress News, so we’ll get rid of those things.

Now, just tidy this up a little bit.

This is all drag and drop, so I can just drag the recent comments under the recent drafts and keep the incoming links there, nice and tidy!

And then I can close the screen options, and there we are.

A nice, tidy dashboard with everything on it that we need.

OK, now we’re just going to go and do some more settings, just some fine adjustments here.

So, we click on the Settings tab, and now just open up a panel here.

General Settings, make sure we are in that area.

Blog Title & Tagline, now, we’re going to need to look at these, but I don’t want to do that just yet.

I haven’t quite decided exactly what I’m going to call the blog and exactly what the tagline or the little description is going to be.

I do want people to be able to register to my blog, so I’m going to click that there and Time Zone.

Right, let’s see if we can find London.

A little trick for this, if you continually click on the first letter for what you’re looking for in the dropdown list, it’ll actually go through them all until you find the one that you want, and just lick on it…London.

So, that will set the Time Zone to London and it’ll automatically adjust daylight savings for me as well.

Now, Date Format.

Now, because we’re in the UK, or I’m in the UK, we like to format our date with the day in front of the month, so J here stands for the day so we’ll get rid of that and we’ll just put the J in front.

Now, I like mine to show, as though it’s the eighth and the second, etc…so a capital S will allow us to do that…so J, capital S, F, comma, capital Y and that will give us 8th of January, 2010.

I’ll show you that in a minute.

OK, Time Format, that’s fne by me, and my week starts on a Monday so that’s fine.

We’ll save those changes and, as promised, you can see that the date format has changed there; 8th January, 2010.

And, you can see that it’s configured to daylight savings on the 28th of March, 2010, also, that’s good.

OK, now, next, a little thing that we need to do is check the previous settings here.

This is very important, make sure that you’ve got the top one clicked here.

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including the search engines.

If that isn’t ticked, you’re going to wonder why nobody’s finding your site and it’s not appearing in the search engines.

Make sure this one’s ticked; important…and then save changes.

There we go.

And, then we have, just our final one that I like to tidy up and set up.

This sets, the URLs of our blog.

Now, you may have heard of a term called Friendly URLs.

By default, WordPress doesn’t have Friendly URLs and what they are, are URLs that are in words rather than these funny things that they call query strings.

Like this one here, this example here we have ?p=123; not very friendly to me, not very friendly to a search engine, the only thing it’s good for is to tell WordPress that that URL points to Post 123.

So, to make it a bit more friendly, we click on Custom Structure, here and we are going to type in forward slash, percentage, category…this will, and then percentage, forward slash, sorry, forward slash there…that will put in the category as the first part of the URL and we will put in percentage postname and then percentage, forward slash. So you will have colchesterantiques.com forward slash, antiques if antiques is the category, forward slash this is a very nice and rare clock, if that was the name of the post.

A lot more friendly for human beings and a lot more friendly for search engines.

So, there we have it.

There are the few tweaks and adjustments that I just wanted to do today that gets us ready to do bits so I can install our plugins, etc,  before we begin posting.

Hope that was fine and you found that OK.

If you want to see my previous post on how to install WordPress, then nip over to SEANCLARK.COM.

You can also leave a comment on the blog there if you’ve got any questions, or you can catch me on Twitter at SeanEClark..

Or, finally, you can e-mail me: info@SeanClark.com with any questions and I’ll be more than happy to help.

Speak to you soon.

Have a good day.

End of Video Transcription

In my last post I talked through why I believe every small business should have a blog, today I will demonstrate how easy it is to setup your own WordPress blog without any technical knowledge. In the following video I take you through the WordPress installation process step by step:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb-PrZWTu5Q

Please see the notes below for more information on points mentioned in the video, if these don’t answer your queries please ask questions by commenting on this post:

• Look for hosting providers that have cPanel & Fantastico installed
• For UK hosting try Compila.com or in the US HostGator
• Remember when installing, that you cannot change the Administrator username later
• If you make a mistake you can always go through the process again and delete the current installation

Video Transcription:

Hi! I’m Sean and in my previous post I gave my reasons why I thought every small business should have a blog.

And this week I’m going to show small businesses how they can set up a blog without any technical knowledge.

If you look at the screen in front of you now, you’ll be able to see what we call a C-panel.

Now some hosting companies have C-panel already installed along with something called Fantastico.

If your hosting company doesn’t have this installed then you can easily find a host that does by having a search on Google for C-panel host, or you can go straight to one in the UK called Compila.com, one I’ve used on a number of occasions.

Or if you’re in the US you might want to try Hostgator.com .

Both of those do great value for money hosting and have C-panel and Fantastico installed.
I’ve used both of them and know that this actually works.

Now, we’re gonna go ahead and install a copy of WordPress today using this system.
I am setting up a site at the moment for my father-in-law called ColchesterAntiques.com and we’re gonna use this as the dummy for the run through.

So once you’re logged into your hosting with C-panel you will see something like this that you can see on screen in front of you now.
We just scroll down, then down near the bottom of the screen you’ll find a panel called Software and on here is a Fantastico icon.
We just click on this.

This will bring up the Fantastico installation screen and there’s a number of bits of software that we can actually install if we wish to but today we’re just interested in WordPress.
We click on that.

On the right-hand side this gives us the WordPress installation screen.
We have no current installations so for a new installation we just click on the new installation link.
This now gives us a choice of domain names.

We only have one here, Colchester Antiques, selected by default.

We are going to install it in the root directory, the top directory, so the homepage of our WordPress site will be ColchesterAntiques.com.

If you want it to be anything else then you’ll probably know more than a beginner and you’ll know why you want the directory to be anything else and you would fill that in there.
So we won’t go into that, because you will know if you want to do it.

Now, admin access.
Now this is for accessing the administration area on the back of the WordPress installation, so this will be you’re WordPress administration area.

Now the administration username you cannot change once you have entered that, so make that something other than admin and enter that in there.
And then we  can enter our password we wish to use.
We can actually change this at a later date so no worries there.

We can also add our admin nickname, which can also be changed at a later date.
And we need an administrative email address, and for this I’m going to use my email address.

Now site name; we’re just going to call this colchesterantiques.com, just for now.
When we go on to the next video, we’ll show you how to configure the whole of the site from within WordPress itself, where we can change this as well as change the description.
So at the moment we’re just going to give the description Colchester Antiques.

We’re just setting up the WordPress site itself today, just installing it.
So click on Install WordPress, there we go, finished the installation.

Believe it or not that is your WordPress site now installed, not one bit of technical information whatsoever.

And we can see that it’s installed by going over here.
So this is now the WordPress site we’re on, on Colchester Antiques and this is the administrator log-in area.

So we’re gonna log-in here.
And then you can see we’re into the WordPress admin for ColchesterAntiques.com.

And there’s the front of the site just to prove that it’s all installed, up and running.
How easy was that, eh?
So no technical knowledge, and just took literally a couple of minutes.

So if that gives you any questions, any queries, then leave a comment on my blog and I’ll be sure to answer them.
Alternatively, you can get me on Twitter, seanEclark.

Or you can even email me if you want to, info@seanclark.com, and I’d be more than happy to help.

So I hope that was easy for you and come and check back soon.
I’ll have another video showing you how to configure the blog, install plug-ins, and all the bits and pieces so you can get up and running.

See you soon, cheers!

End of Video Transcription

Sometimes in business we know what is the right thing to do but still overlook it or do something else instead. This is never more true than when it comes to using the web to promote a small businesses. Little thought or planning is given to a new web site, copy and graphics are usually the same as those used for printed media and 2 months later the business owner is asking why they are not number 1 in Google for “eating out in London”.

Yet launching online is as crucial a part of a small businesses overall strategy as is competitor analysis.

Which probably explains why people so surprised at the success of Facebook & Twitter and all of the businesses that have grown on the back of them. The principles of these two applications, and the web itself, are perfectly natural to human beings. The desire for knowledge and to communicate, which these provide.

It’s because of this natural tendency I firmly believe that every small business should have a blog. A blogging platform allows you to publish information and enables communication in a very easy and cost effective way, plus it can interact seamlessly with Facebook & Twitter. A blog is a natural extension of you and your business online, it acts as the central point around which lead generation and sales can be won, or lost. It defines your area and level of expertise and allows you to present your product or service to the end user/customer without commitment. There are a few more technical reasons why a blog is the right platform but these will be covered in a future post.

In the coming weeks I will show you how to:

• Set up hosting
• Launch your blog
• Create content – not just copy
• Promote your business
• Reach new customers

And to assure you, you will need no technical knowledge or copywriting skills to do this. The fact that you already run a business and happen to be reading this are all the skills required.

Image provided under Creative Commons by Ivan Walsh