If you’re webmaster or blogger then you must be aware how crucial it is to take regular backups of your site as they act as a lifesaver in case something unfortunate happens with your site server or it gets hacked. There are several ways to backup a self-hosted WP blog, you can do it manually via phpMyAdmin or simply use one of those Database backup plugins out there to export the backup file to your computer or email.

However, above tricks are meant only to perform a backup of your WordPress site database which includes your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, plugins data, and some other info. But the database doesn’t includes your blog images, plugins, themes, scripts and any other files uploaded to your FTP server. Certainly, it’s advisable to take a complete backup of your site to be on safe side in case some disaster occurs. We’re here to share an easy and efficient way that automates the task of backing up your Full WordPress blog (or just database) to one of the best and most popular cloud storage service ‘Dropbox’. Until now, I had been uploading images and other important stuff manually to Dropbox but not anymore. Here comes the easiest possible way!

WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free plugin for WordPress that automatically uploads a backup of your entire website, including all files and its database, to Dropbox. With a minimalist and simple interface, it makes it easier for you to setup a recurring backup in a few clicks. It lets you initiate a backup process manually and also offers the functionality to schedule backup as desired so as to perform backups on regular basis. You can choose the date, time and frequency for the backup to dropbox. One can also choose what files and folders are to be included in the full backup. There’s a nifty option to select the files and directories that you wish to exclude from your backup.

In simple words, it can backup the root directory of your site (public_html) to a set location on your Dropbox account. You shouldn’t be concerned about the security as the plugin uses OAuth to keep your Dropbox account details safe. No credentials are stored for the plugin to gain access.

How to Backup WordPress Blog to Dropbox –

1. You must have a Dropbox account. It is Free and provides 2GB of free storage.

2. Open your WordPress dashboard, install the plugin ‘WordPress Backup to Dropbox’.

3. After activating the plugin, open its Settings from the Backup option in menu.

4. You now need to Authorize the plugin to connect it with your Dropbox account. Then grant access by clicking the ‘Allow’ button.

5. Now move back to WordPress Dash, go to plugin settings and specify the backup schedule. Tick mark any files or folders that you don’t want to be included.

The backup would be automatically performed at the specific time interval to Dropbox. Voila! All your site’s media and database will now be accessible from anywhere.

Plugin site – WordPress Backup to Dropbox

via  [TechBU]

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From past 2 days, WebTrickz was experiencing major technical issues and several long downtimes occurred in short intervals. Though, our site is running perfectly now as we moved from Hostgator’s Shared hosting to their VPS. We got to learn some new things while getting our issue sorted. A simple tip is shared below which may come in handy to bloggers and webmasters using WordPress.

Certainly, our Comments section is bloated with lot of Spam comments listed under Spam section and similarly there are Pending comments. If you want to get rid of all the Spam or Pending comments, then you can easily remove all of them at once in just a few clicks without the need to use the uneasy phpMyAdmin method.

Just install the WP-Optimize plugin directly from your WordPress Dashboard and activate it. To access it, just open the Dashboard drop-down menu and click on the “WP-Optimize” option. Now tick mark the desired option ‘Clean marked Spam comments’ or ‘Clean Unapproved comments’ (Pending comments). Click on the Process button.

Voila! All the Spam or Pending/Unapproved comments will get deleted instantly. You can deactivate this plugin later if you don’t want to use it frequently.

Update – I just noticed that we can easily bulk delete all the Spam comments in WordPress without using any plugin. To do so, go to Comments > Spam and click on the “Empty Spam” button. All the spam comments will get deleted.

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If you’re a blog administrator who frequently organises giveaway and contest, then you’ll find this article really helpful. Making a comment by participants is necessary in most of the giveaways and it becomes really difficult for site admin to randomly draw the winners, if the comments are in large number.

An exclusive way is discovered by us which will allow you to extract the email addresses, IP address and Name of all commentators from a specific post in WordPress.org.

Follow the step by step tutorial below carefully to extract Email address:

1. Login to cPanel (of your blog host).

2. Go to phpMyAdmin under Databases section.

3. Select your blog database from the left panel which may be marked as _wrdp1

4. Click on wp_comments from table in left hand side.

5. Now click on “Search” tab.

6. Open Options (in blue), Select comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_ip in the fields box. Tick mark ‘DISTINCT’ to remove the exactly similar entries (those with same name, email and IP address).

7. Input comment_post_id = xxxx under "Add search conditions (body of the "where" clause):" Replace xxxx with the post ID.

To find Post ID of a post, just login to your blog’s WordPress dashboard. Open ‘Posts’ and point your mouse over the preferred post. You’ll then see a link in the status bar of browser. Just note the no. next to post=xxx (For eg: Here it is 7260) as shown below:

8. Set Number of rows per page to 1000

9. Display order Ascending

10. Click ‘GO’ button. All queries will be sorted now.

11. Click Export button, select ‘CSV for MS Excel’ and tick mark ‘Save as file’. Click GO.

A MS Excel file will now be produced containing all the commentators name, IP and email address from a certain post. You can then find duplicate email and IP addresses and sort the invalid ones using Excel. Then you can copy all the email addresses and use Random.org to draw the giveaway winners.

This guide looks difficult in starting but you’ll find it really easy, once you get used to it. This post is specially for bloggers who conduct big giveaways on their blog.

Do share this tutorial if you find it useful.

Update – Sandip of BlogsDNA has provided us a source code which eliminates 6 steps and makes it real easy to do this task. Check below how to do it:

Go to phpMyAdmin and select your blog database. Now click on “SQL” tab. Input the below SQL query there and click the ‘Go’ button. You’ll now come straight to Step 11.

SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM wp_comments
WHERE `comment_post_ID` = ‘xxxx’
) AS WEBTRICKZ

Remember to Replace xxxx with your Post ID.

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WordPress has updated its app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad with the launch of new Apple iOS 4. WordPress Version 2.5 for iOS resolves many of the issues and quirks.

What’s New:

• New Add Blog feature adds all of your WordPress.com blogs in one easy step
• Better handling of drafts in progress when quitting the app
• Performance enhancements, UI improvements, and bug fixes
• Supports fast app switching in iOS 4.
• Optimized for the Retina Display on iPhone 4.
• Cut-and-paste now behaves as expected on the iPad.

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The much awaited version of WordPress 3.0 is finally released and available for download. WordPress 3.0 comes with lot of improvements, fixes, and features a sexy new default theme called ‘Twenty Ten’.

WordPress 3.0 merges MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality. Users will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates and you can upgrade multiple plugins at once with a single click. It allows creation of custom menus combining posts, pages, categories, tags, and links for use in theme menus or widgets, and much more.

See full list of changes in WP 3.0 [Version 3.0]

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Few days back, WebTrickz (Self Hosted WordPress blog) started showing blank white pages when opening the index or home page and 404 error pages when opening any single post. If your WP blog is having a similar issue, then don’t panic because I’ve found an easy way to fix this problem.

First, make sure you’ve a backed up your blog database. Deactivate all Plugins and see if the issue is resolved. If this doesn’t works then follow the below tutorial:

Recommend Trick – I’ve tried it myself 2 times and it worked great.

To fix this issue, Login to your blog Cpanel (Control panel). Open the ‘My SQL Databases’ entry located under Databases box in cpanel.

Under Modify Databases, open drop-down menu of Repair DB: and select your blog database.

Click ‘Repair DB’ button and wait for repairing process to be completed.

Now open your blog and it must be working fine.

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WordPress development team has today released the Beta 1 of WordPress 3.0. I can’t hold myself to try it out, hence quickly installed it on WP Offline.

The WordPress 3.0 Beta replaces the old WordPress default theme with new theme ‘Twenty Ten’. The new theme looks simple and cool, offering a intuitive interface.

The Appearance tab adds 3 new options – Menus, Background, and Header.

You can switch between 8 cool Headers or upload a custom header image.

The Background option allows to change the position and color of your theme background. You can also upload a custom background image.

The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them.

I also noticed, the Drag widgets to sidebar function has now been fixed out.

Download WordPress 3.0 Beta 1   [Via]

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WordPress for BlackBerry version 1.1 is now released for Blackberry phones. The app allows you to write posts, upload photos and videos, edit pages, and manage comments. You can download it for Free below:

New Features in version 1.1:

• Comment Notifications
• Geotagging of Posts
• Improved UI interaction on Touch devices
• introduction of Touch Gestures:
  Sliding a finger to the left or right quickly on the Comment screen displays the next or
  previous comment.
• Photo Resizing improvements with user defined dimensions
• New File Browser with thumbnails support
• Overall enhancements to the speed and stability of the app

New languages added:

English, Italian, Finnish, French, Indonesian, German, and Portuguese (Portugal)

Download Here

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