Posts Tagged ‘blog’

Posted on September 22, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

3 plugins to backup your WordPress blog. Love your database!

WordPress, the blogging platform we all know and love is used by almost everyone from main stream media such as CNN, MTV to universities such as Arkansas at Little Rock to celebrities such as Perez Hilton. WordPress is also used by leading tech blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch and Gigaom . Installing a self-hosted version of WordPress.org is very simple and a lot of web hosting providers offer one click installs, but what about a backup? Most web hosting services offers daily backups of your files and I hope for your sake a daily back up of your sql / mysql WordPress database. But just in case they don’t here are three WordPress plugins to back up your WordPress database.

1. WP-DBManager
Pitch: Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

2. WordPress Automatic Online Backup
Pitch: You can prevent loss of data using an automated backup of your blog database. You create a free account on www.wordpressbackup.com (wpb), connect your blog with the wbp via a key.

3. WordPress Database Backup
Pitch: WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Bonus: Two of the plugins offer the ability to have your database emailed to you on a scheduled time. I recommend creating an alternative gmail or ymail email address and use one of the plugins to email you a backup of your database daily.

How are you backing up your self hosted WordPress blog?

Posted on September 15, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

5 new ways to filter, find and read blog content. Blogs are back!

It seems like innovation has hit the technology community again especially in the RSS / blogging / content aggregation sector. Just a few months ago everyone was talking about or how micro-blogging sites such as Twitter would kill blogs. People were saying RSS was too slow and everyone would be using people aggregation to find information in the terms of if something was important, people through social networks such as Facebook & Twitter would tell find information that way instead of reading blogs.

While that may stay true for some, new ways of filtering, finding and reading content have emerged helping users find relevant content to their interest. Let’s take a look.

1. YourVersion – http://www.yourversion.com

YourVersion continuously discovers new and personally relevant web content based on your interests, and lets you easily bookmark and share your discoveries with friends.
YourVersion was recently named DemoPit peoples’ choice winner at TechCrunch50

2. Google Fast Flip – http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

3. LazyFeed – http://www.lazyfeed.com

Lazyfeed is a web service that allows you to subscribe to any topics and get live updates. Just save any topic you are interested in, and forget about it. Lazyfeed will remember and let you know when there’s new content on that topic, just like an instant messenger. Lazyfeed allows you to stay on top of everything you care about, effortlessly.

4. Feedly (Firefox plug-in) – http://www.feedly.com

feedly organizes your favorite sites into a fun, magazine-like start page.

5. Alltop – http://Alltop.com

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you.

While Feedly and Alltop have been online a lot longer than LazyFeed, Google Fast Flip and YourVersion, I thought they could be useful to the non-tech readers of SocialWayne.com.

Google Reader is still my preferred choice to read blogs but with features like auto discovery of new content LazyFeed and YourVersion are good tools for bloggers looking to find content or just to keep up with the latest news from the social web / blogosphere.

Out of the five tools which one do you use? What do you use to read blogs?

Posted on July 27, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

3 apps for easy iPhone mobile blogging

If you have noticed the text “Post From My iPhone” on a few of my post recently is because I have been using the BlogPress iPhone app to post with. BlogPress was one of the first iPhone blogging apps along with iBlogger, iWriter and soon afterwards came the WordPress iPhone app. Almost all four blogging iPhone apps support multiple blogging platforms such as blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Drupal and more.

My favorite is the WordPress app but it doesn’t always work with self-hosted WordPress blogs do to some XML-RPC error therefor I use the BlogPress app for mobile blogging. BlogPress may be my second favorite app but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking features. As a matter of fact it has some features that the WordPress iPhone doesn’t such as image resizing but according to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg a new better version of WordPress for the iPhone is on the way soon after the release of the iPhone 3.0 OS.

In terms of mobile blogging with the iPhone it’s simple, select
a photo, type and post. My only disappointment so far is the lack of support for posting vidoes from within any of the blogging apps since the release of iPhone 3Gs. I see more apps making it easy to send video to Facebook and Twitter than I do to allow users to post video to your blog. But I hope that changes soon.

Either way if your good with your thumbs on your iPhone and don’t always have the time to blog from your computer, I suggest give WordPress, BlogPress or iBlogger a try.

What is your favorite iPhone blogging app?

– Post From My iPhone

Posted on June 22, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

About the Social Carolina calendar and blog.

In 2007 Brian Russell, Anton Zuiker, Jackson Fox, myself and a few more individuals were talking about how we needed a single source to track all of the technology events in the Triangle. For those of you who are not familiar with the area, the Triangle stands for Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and surrounding communities. Our problem was that we would miss a meetup or local confernece and there wasn’t a good way of letting others know about upcoming events being held locally. Thus Brian created a google calendar and I registered the domain name SocialCarolina.org and SocialCarolina.com, built the website and embeded the google calendar and thus SocialCarolina.org, Connecting the Community to the events was launched.

Soon after I installed a WordPress blog at the url SocialCarolina.com/blog and we started sending out events to guest post and add events to the calendar. A few months later Viget launched Refresh The Triangle and included the SocialCarolin.org calendar and we were on our way. Over time we expanded our Triangle reach to Charlotte and Greensboro, NC with a few guest blog post and events added to the calendar and now we we have around thirty individuals adding various events. Some events are blogger meetups, tweetups, startup drinks, entrepreneur meetups, ruby, java, drupel meetups, social media talks and more. But it seems due to everyone including myself working on various projects, we have found little time to blog about upcoming events or posting recaps of past events on SocialCarolian.org. Therefore I have removed the blog and redirected the blog link pointing to my site to the North Carolina category we’re I’ll post about events, technology and people in NC. Besides blogging about events in the Triangle another plan for the SocialCaroliana.org website was to have a job board. We’ll that never took off but I talked to Greg Hyer of http://www.linkingraleighnc.com who runs a successful job board on his site, therefore I’m going to link to it for the jobs link.

The ultimate goal of SocialCarolina.com was to create our own, “TechCrunch” like site covering NC. Maybe the timing was off or I was a little to early to the game. It was 2007 when we started the site before the “social” became super popular and overused with the phase “social media”. Regardless, we’ll keep the calendar updated as much as posssible and if you would like to have your event added to the site email: events at socialcarolina dot org or follow us on twitter as @RDCH and send us a tweet. We do have a facebook group and an email mailing list where we send out messages about upcoming events in the area.

For those who contributed to the blog, calendar or have continue to help promote this awesome technology / social media community we have in North Carolina. Thank You!

Wayne Sutton

Posted on June 11, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

How to manage your online social identity and why it's important 101. – episode 054

Today on Talk Social News Kipp and Wayne discuss: How to manage your online social identity and why it’s important 101. – episode 054

The Video:

The podcast:
Talk Social News daily 054 – length 12:00 download or click to play:[audio:talksocialnewsdaily054.mp3] Subscribe to podcast in iTunes:

If you would like to sponsor Talk Social News email us at contact@talksocialnews.com. Thanks