I’m not sure about the WordPress question. Sounds like you’re using a free account right now? If so, you wouldn’t be able to implement some of these suggestions I’ve made as they pertain to a hosted account of your own.

If you’re using a free WordPress account, just set up another one with a new username and password (i.e. a new account).

If you have a hosted one, I think the dashboard is pretty much the same.

I did find you through Barbara’s BWAB btw. She has mentioned her “practice” blog before and I had wondered about it.

If I set up a free Wordpress.com blog as a sample blog, does it use the same dashboard as wp.org does so I’d be learning the same “system” basically?

I did make progress on my “behind the scenes” projects for my blog the past two weeks. But I really miss posting on my blog, plus reading and commenting on other blogs!

Thanks again for your help! I will check YouTube for WP lessons — great idea!

Cheers!

Speaking of the .htaccess file, there’s one more piece of code I’d like to share which I forgot to mention.

Insert this into all of your .htaccess files. What it will do is prevent web browsers from being able to access it. The file permission 644 does the same thing, however, why not add one more layer of protection?

<Files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</Files>


Hope you have a good weekend, too.

I’m happy Linda Abbit found you, as I know she’s taking time off to work behind the scenes of her blog.

I’ve made some changes to my .htaccess file, but you’ve reminded me to double check it. I’ll be back later to reread this and make sure I have my bases covered.

This series is totally awesome. Thank you for sharing and for all of your hard work.

Have a great weekend. I hope you’re getting three days off.
Barbara Swafford’s last blog post..Plugins, Questions and Open Mic

Thanks for noticing about the posts. Yes, they’ve been taking a long time to write. That’s ok though, it’s important for people to learn.

About the backups - no problem about the email backups, that’s what I do. I do it just once a week. I suppose if you post every day then maybe 3 times a week would be fine.

I’m sure there are some YouTube videos out there that can help you learn WordPress. Maybe what you should do is set up a free WordPress account on WordPress.com and use it to toy around. Upload and activate plugins, etc.

Well I’m always here if you have a question you gotta know the answer to. Either use the contact form or post in our community forums.

Talk to you later and have a great weekend yourself!

I’ve just read — OK, some skimming too — this series of posts. It is fabulously put together and I so appreciate the amount of time and effort you put into each post. . . . and it terrifies me to even think about doing any of these things!

I know they’re important however, and once I’m a little more comfortable with even the basic WP.org dashboard, I will attempt these. I read in one of the comments that Barbara Swafford wishes she knew all of this from the start. If I knew all of this had to be done, I might never have started blogging! I’m afraid to even touch any of the plug-ins my designer set up for me, which I know isn’t a good thing, but that’s where I’m at so far in my learning curve. I wish there were a WP.org school that I could go to in person and ask all of my zillion of questions at once every other week or so (that’s my best learning style!). If you know of one, please let me know. The help section and forum on the WP site is way over my head.

One thing you mentioned that gives me great peace of mind is that our hosting company (GoDaddy in my case) has a backup of our blog. At least I hope they do . . . that I can and will check on!

I am using the Automatic backup plug in, and have it emailing me a file daily. Is that too often — is once a week enough? It comes in a .sql.gz format — will I be able to use that to recover my blog if necessary. It’s all Greek to me! My blog designer sent me a zip file with my template and ??? in it, so that’s good, but I was wondering about this part. Is emailing it to myself better than downloading it to my computer? I chose the email route, not sure of the other.

I’m subscribing to your blog now via RSS.

Thanks again & enjoy your long weekend with your family!

Linda Abbit’s last blog post..Tender Loving Eldercare Goes Back to School