Upcoming classes: Backups, Upgrades, & Web Colors

A quick roundup of upcoming stuff:

Tomorrow (Thursday, June 10), I’m Cairene MacDonald’s guest for a special Bite the Candy workshop on backups and upgrades. So if you’ve been putting off backing up your hard drive, or upgrading your WordPress plugins, or you want support with other backup-and-upgrade-related issues, join us for a dose of reassurance and some focused work time.

Learn all about Bite the Candy and sign up here.

Next week, on Wednesday, June 16, I’m holding a free Color Clinic teleclass with artist Amy Crook of Not Dead Yet Studios and Antemortem Arts. We’ll talk about the do’s and don’ts of choosing colors for your website (I’ve got lots of stuff to ask Amy, because I’m a builder, not a designer — I deliver function, and the form is pretty much up to you), plus we’ll announce our top secret joint project!

Learn about the Color Clinic and sign up here.

Finally, my Love Your List workshop with Shannon Wilkinson is going really well, and you can still join us! The live workshop runs through June 22, and you’ll have access to all the call recordings so you can catch up and get AWeber all set up to build your business. We will be packaging the recordings and creating a workbook for a home-study version, which will be priced 50% higher. So if you want all the same materials as the home-study version, for a much lower price, you’ll want to sign up now.

Learn about Love Your List and sign up here.

I love doing these live classes, and I’d be thrilled to have you join me for any of them.

Backups and Upgrades: The Greatest Hits Collection

The smart and wonderful Cairene MacDonald from Third Hand Works has invited me to be a special guest teleclass leader for her excellent Bite the Candy series of workshops this Thursday, June 10, on the subject of Backups and Upgrades Without Tears.

Side note: “Without tears” is pretty much my preferred way to do everything, except maybe attend weddings — there’s no avoiding a meltdown of empathetic joy in that case, so I just bring tissues.

Anyway, I’ve written about upgrades in detail here on the blog, and I thought I’d collect all the related links into a handy-dandy reference in honor of biting the candy.

How to upgrade practically anything

This is a 6-part series on upgrading, inspired by my experiences upgrading WordPress from version 2.6 to 2.8. It’s written mostly about software, but the theory and practical steps apply to hardware, website stuff, and everything in between. More or less.

I also wrote posts (with step-by-step screenshots) on how to upgrade WordPress and how to upgrade a WordPress plugin. Since I wrote the latter post, WordPress has introduced the ability to bulk-upgrade plugins (meaning you can upgrade a bunch of them all at once, with a single click), which is an awesome time-saver and probably means I need to write another post illustrating that process.

The backup brigade

Did you happen to notice that I devoted a whole entry (Step 2) of the upgrade series to backing up? If you go read my post about upgrading WordPress, you’ll see that I mention backups there, too. And any sane upgrade guide will tell you the same thing: Back up before you upgrade.

This is why backups and upgrades are a package deal. You need your stuff backed up before you attempt an upgrade (honestly, you need your stuff backed up no matter what, but upgrading is a great excuse!).

Here are three posts about backups:

I’m looking forward to biting some candy with Cairene on Thursday, and I hope you’ll consider joining us!