Maintaining Your Blog is a Full Time Job
As a blog installer and user, I spend a lot of time inside the WordPress Dashboard.
That section is the hub of operations for WordPress, where you can see how many posts and pages you have, how many comments have been added, whether any of those comments were spam, and even whether you have the current version of WordPress or the plugins.
You will often find that the version of WordPress seems to be constantly changing.
In fact, WordPress is constantly beta testing at least two versions while the current version is running on our servers.
Because of the way people get their blogs, it is nearly impossible for WordPress to get the word out to everyone about the newest version except through the dashboard.
When you log in to the administration section of your WordPress blog, WordPress sends a little ping to the home site at WordPress.
org and checks to see what the current live version of WordPress is at that moment.
When your blog finds out that your version is out of date, it sends out the Nag messages that will plague you until you finally cannot take it anymore and you upgrade your WordPress! With the Fantastico (shudder) service that a lot of hosting companies are offering, you can do a one click installation of WordPress, but when it comes time to upgrade, the little one click install becomes a nightmare to upgrade, because file permissions get messed up whenever a server-run program moves files around on a server.
It ends up making it next to impossible (unless you are the network administrator) to delete or update files! I teach my students to avoid Fantastico in the first place, and create a more secure environment to work in by manually creating your database, uploading your files via FTP and installing your upgrades by uploading them to your website using the WordPress Automatic Updater plugin.
This tool will even take care of backing up your database and files in case you need to go back to the original version of the blog.
Each individual plugin is also part of the routine that WordPress checks against the WordPress.
org server to see if any of them have been updated recently and whether you need to update yours to match the server.
In order to update plugins, you just need to click on the Update Automatically link and it should walk you through the steps for updating the plugin.
Unless you are stuck with a permission problem, the plugin updating process should be pretty straightforward.
I have run into situations on one of my blogs where over 20 of my plugins were in need of updates at the same time.
This means lots of extra time spent updating each of the plugins, when I was supposed to be writing a blog post.
In fact, maintaining my blog becomes such a regular thing to me, that I sort of do it in a trance like state.
The problem is, my writing suffers because I am stuck having to write at times outside my budgeted writing times, which sets me back in other tasks, too.
A great solution to that is setting up your blog on a maintenance plan so that you can concentrate on your writing instead of replacing plugins and upgrading WordPress.
The good thing about most maintenance programs is that they will also run regular backups once a month of both your database and the blog files themselves.
This is important in the event that your server crashes or your blog gets hacked.
Having a monthly backup means you can save yourself from a total loss if you only have 3 weeks worth of posts lost.
As you can see, with the amount of work a blogger must do just to keep content flowing so that readers can keep coming back, it is a smart move to look for a competent and trustworthy company to take care of your blog maintenance.
The less technical work you have to concentrate on, the more you can be providing your readers with more and more content!
That section is the hub of operations for WordPress, where you can see how many posts and pages you have, how many comments have been added, whether any of those comments were spam, and even whether you have the current version of WordPress or the plugins.
You will often find that the version of WordPress seems to be constantly changing.
In fact, WordPress is constantly beta testing at least two versions while the current version is running on our servers.
Because of the way people get their blogs, it is nearly impossible for WordPress to get the word out to everyone about the newest version except through the dashboard.
When you log in to the administration section of your WordPress blog, WordPress sends a little ping to the home site at WordPress.
org and checks to see what the current live version of WordPress is at that moment.
When your blog finds out that your version is out of date, it sends out the Nag messages that will plague you until you finally cannot take it anymore and you upgrade your WordPress! With the Fantastico (shudder) service that a lot of hosting companies are offering, you can do a one click installation of WordPress, but when it comes time to upgrade, the little one click install becomes a nightmare to upgrade, because file permissions get messed up whenever a server-run program moves files around on a server.
It ends up making it next to impossible (unless you are the network administrator) to delete or update files! I teach my students to avoid Fantastico in the first place, and create a more secure environment to work in by manually creating your database, uploading your files via FTP and installing your upgrades by uploading them to your website using the WordPress Automatic Updater plugin.
This tool will even take care of backing up your database and files in case you need to go back to the original version of the blog.
Each individual plugin is also part of the routine that WordPress checks against the WordPress.
org server to see if any of them have been updated recently and whether you need to update yours to match the server.
In order to update plugins, you just need to click on the Update Automatically link and it should walk you through the steps for updating the plugin.
Unless you are stuck with a permission problem, the plugin updating process should be pretty straightforward.
I have run into situations on one of my blogs where over 20 of my plugins were in need of updates at the same time.
This means lots of extra time spent updating each of the plugins, when I was supposed to be writing a blog post.
In fact, maintaining my blog becomes such a regular thing to me, that I sort of do it in a trance like state.
The problem is, my writing suffers because I am stuck having to write at times outside my budgeted writing times, which sets me back in other tasks, too.
A great solution to that is setting up your blog on a maintenance plan so that you can concentrate on your writing instead of replacing plugins and upgrading WordPress.
The good thing about most maintenance programs is that they will also run regular backups once a month of both your database and the blog files themselves.
This is important in the event that your server crashes or your blog gets hacked.
Having a monthly backup means you can save yourself from a total loss if you only have 3 weeks worth of posts lost.
As you can see, with the amount of work a blogger must do just to keep content flowing so that readers can keep coming back, it is a smart move to look for a competent and trustworthy company to take care of your blog maintenance.
The less technical work you have to concentrate on, the more you can be providing your readers with more and more content!