Business Blogging Pros

VaultPress vs BackupBuddy Vs Updraft Plus

I recently decided to stop relying upon my web hosting company for daily backups.  In the process I evaluated three WordPress backup plugins:

• VaultPress
• BackupBuddy
• UpdraftPlus

Bottom Line: for me, UpdraftPlus  was the best choice, though for most people I thing VaultPress would be fine.

VaultPress

VaultPress is offered by Automatic, the same people behind WordPress.com. VaultPress stores the backups on Automatic's servers. There is no option to store your backups elsewhere. It can be inexpensive - if you dig a bit you can find the option whereby the charge is only $5/month.

I have several clients using VaultPress and it has always performed flawlessly.

There are two things you should know about VaultPress:

1. It backs up the WP-Content folder (and it's subfolders and contents) and nothing else.  For most people that is just fine, but I have clients with additional folders in the root of the site containing videos, podcasts, etc.  If the site were to go down, restoring just wp-content would not be enough.
2. It backs up only tables in the database containing the 'wp_' (or whatever you have chosen) prefix.  There is a plugin I use (Digital Access Pass) that creates its own tables in the database with the prefix 'dap_'.  Whatever backup tool I use needs to backup everything in the database.

Bottom line for me was that VaultPress did not give me the functionality I needed.

BackupBuddy

On paper, BackupBuddy looked like the perfect choice.

• It can be configured to backup every file, including custom folders you have created in the root of your website.  
• It can be configured to backup the entire database.
• If offers several options as to where it stores the backups.You can store the backups on your website, or offsite in Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc.
• In fact, you can have it store multiple copies of the backups in multiple different repositories for redundancy.

One negative: BackupBuddy does not support WordPress Multisite.

After using BackupBuddy for a few weeks however, I found that it simply was not robust. I have a couple dozen little websites and blogs.  Almost every day, I would receive error messages telling me that the backup process failed on at least three of them, which meant I would have to go investigate and manually re-initiate the backup process.  If it was always failing on the same three websites then I could find the problem and fix it.  Not so however. I frequently had failures one sites that had run fine to several days. When I explained the problem to their support guy, his response was:

"My own personal approach is that if the hosting can be a bit flakey sometimes then I don't bother with chasing up the occasional backup failure on a site"

I'm sorry, that doesn't cut it. Not only is the backup process not robust, I found that the Restore process suffered from the same non-robustness. I was in the process of moving some of my websites to a different hosting company, and found that the backup files created by BackupBuddy were so large that I could never get them to successfully upload to the new server without timing out.

The bottom line with BackupBuddy was that I had to babysit it way too much.

UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the premium version of the free Updraft plugin. I offers several features that the free version does not have. (You can find a comparison chart here.)

UpdraftPlus offers all the features that BackupBuddy does (or at least the features important to me) and it just works. (It also supports WordPress Multisite but I have not tested it there.)

I've been using it for about a week now on over a dozen websites and it has operated without a hiccup. I've used the Restore functions to move websites between servers and it worked very smoothly (UpdraftPlus divides the backup into several zip files instead of one huge one, thus avoing the timeout issue.)

 

Update to WordPress 4.4.1 Causes Redirect Loop

Many people who quickly updated their WordPress sites to 4.4.1 were met with a rude surprise: Accessing the site's home page causes a redirect loop. 

If this has happened to you then log in to your dashboard.  Go to Settings->General.  Make sure there are no uppercase characters in these two fields:

WordPerss Address (URL)
Site Address (URL)

These two values may also specified in wp-config.php:

define('WP_HOME','http://yoururl.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://yoururl.com');

If there is an uppercase character in these URLs then WordPress 4.4.1 will go into an infinite redirect loop

 

Tracking EBook Downloads

Almost every blogger these days has an eBook available for free download. It would be nice to know how many times that eBook has been downloaded, wouldn't it? Fortunately, Google Analytics provides us with a way.You can create an 'Event'.

Note: Google is slowly migrating from it's classing analytics code (ga.js) to Universal Analytics (analytics.js) To determine which you are using, do a 'Vire Source' on any page in your blog and look for 'ga.js' or analytics.js'.

Event Tracking with ga.js

Google has a page that describes setting up event tracking but here it is in a nutshell:

Let's say you have two ebooks as well as several other items available for download. Right now the dowload link for the first ebook probably looks something like this:

<a href="http://blablabla/ebook1.pdf">Click Here to Download EBook 1</a>

To this, you would add something like:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Downloads', EBooks', 'Book 1']);"

The entire download link then becomes:

<a href="http://blablabla/ebook1.pdf" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Downloads', EBooks', 'Book 1']);">Click Here to Download EBook 1</a>

This allows you to:

• Track downloads separately from any other events you might create.
• Track EBook downloads separately from your other downloads
• Seperately track the number of downloads of each ebook.

Event Tracking with analytics.js

Google has a page that describes setting up event tracking but here it is in a nutshell:

Let's say you have two ebooks as well as several other items available for download. Right now the dowload link for the first ebok probably looks somehting like this:

<a href="http://blablabla/ebook1.pdf">Click Here to Download EBook 1</a>

To this, you would add something like:

onClick="ga('send', 'event', 'Downloads', 'Ebooks', 'Book 1');"

The entire download link then becomes:

<a href="http://blablabla/ebook1.pdf" onClick="ga('send', 'event', 'Downloads', 'Ebooks', 'Book 1');">Click Here to Download EBook 1</a>

This allows you to:

• Track downloads separately from any other events you might create.
• Track EBook downloads separately from your other downloads
• Separately track the number of downloads of each ebook.

Viewing Event Metrics in Google Analytics

Log in to your Google Analytics account. Go to Behavior->Events->Top Events to see how many times your ebook has been downloaded.

 

 

Video Missing from RSS Feeds

One of the frequent complaints I hear is that a YouTube video imbedded in a blog post does not appear in the blog's RSS feed.  This is also true for the 'Subscribe via Email' facilities found on most blogs.

The sad truth is that RSS is not a multimedia protocol. 

For our own clients, we have a routine we have written that detects when the WordPress function the_content() is being used for an RSS feed. It scans the post and replaces the embedded YouTube video with an image.  The image is linked back to the blog post.

The result is that RSS feed consumers wil see the image, click on it, and view the video in the original blog.

Which Website Pages Are Your Mobile Visitors Viewing?

When creating a mobile-optimized website, It is important to create the shortest path possible (the leat number of taps) to the content mobile visitors want. Google Analytics allows us to do that, though it is a little laborious.

1. Drill down in the left sidebar menu through Behavior and Site Content.  Click on All Pages.
2. Locate the Secondary DImension drop-down above the header. Drill down through Vistors and click on Device Category.
3. The display will refresh with a new Device Category column.
4. Click on the new Device Category column header to sort by that column.

 

Creating a Client Area for FIle Uploads

We are currently creating a website for a printing company who needs an access-controlled area for clients to upload files. One of the best things about Wordpress is the nearly endless supply of plugins that add functionality. And one of the worst things about Wordpress is the nearly endless supply of plugins.

Many are out of date and do not work with the latest releases of Wordpress. Many don't work at all or are not ready for prime time. We expend considerable energy evaluating plugins and running them through our own internal certification process before foisting them on unsuspecting clients. After all, our clients trust us to deliver websites that work.

For providing client upload functionality, we like Smartypants Client Document Manager the best. It does require the use of an additional plugin, Theme My Login in order to make access control be seamless for the user, but the end result works very well and gets along nicely with the other plugins and themes we use.

 

Online Image Resizing Tool

I found a great (and simple) online tool for resizing images.

While both Typepad and WordPress can automatically resize images in the body of a page or post, often you need to resize an image manually for placement in the sidebar.

This tool at http://www.photosize.com does exactly that and nothing more.

Checking our Sites for iPad Compatibility

I was meeting with a new client yesterday and suddenly realized that everyone around the table had an iPad except me.  While my client is an industry leader, they are not a high-tech company by any means.  The message to me is that it is becoming imperative to test the websites and blogs we build not only for compatibility with the popular browsers, we need to be testing for iPad compatibility as well.

"My Blog Posts aren't Showing Up on Facebook and LinkedIn"

At least once a month someone calls me or send me an email with this problem.  The purpose of this article is to help you troupbleshoot it.

The fact that your posts aren't showing up in TWO places is significant.  It means the problem is not at either Facebook or LinkedIn.  What else is in common?

• Are both Facebook and LinkedIn being fed from Twitter?
• Are both being fed your RSS feed via Feedburner?

If the answer to either of those is 'Yes' then you have an additional point of commonality to investigate.

The Most Common Cause

Note the date of your last blog post that appears on Facebook and Twitter. That's important because the problem is mostlikely associated with the very next post, the first one that didn't get published on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Usually when I investigate the problem, I discover the culprit is the client has pasted directly from MS-Word.  Most people have 'Replace straight quotation marks with smart quotation marks' turned on, for example.  Smart Quotes are not legal characters in an RSS feed and will bring things to a halt.

Follow these steps to fix the offending post:

1. Carefully look for curly single and double quote characters.  Replace then with the stright variety.
2. Switch to HTML mode (There is an HTML tab at the upper right of the Body field).  Strip out everything that is not the text of your post.
3. Switch back to Rich Text mode and reformat.