Feeling a little out of tune?

October 28, 2011 By
Tuning a Bass Guitar by Martin Howard

Thanks to Martin Howard on Flickr for this rockin' image

Perhaps you haven’t updated WordPress in awhile.

Maybe you’ve even “tuned out” the pink bar at the top of the screen that politely yet firmly tells you to Please update now!

And you’re avoiding the little circle-with-a-number in your sidebar that keeps insistently telling you that an ever-larger number of plugins have new versions available.

You may have even read my instructions for updating WordPress, or watched my video tutorial on updating WordPress, and you’ve told yourself, “this looks easy, maybe I should take care of this.”

Yet you hold off on pressing that “Update” button. You’re not 100% confident that it will go smoothly.

Perhaps you’ve heard tales of upgrades gone bad…and even attempts to be reassuring, like my post But what if your WordPress upgrade fails?, lead you to wonder…what else could go wrong?

Hey, you’re not alone. Even rockstars sometimes get out of tune or break a guitar string (I suspect that breaking a guitar string happens all the time to the pros, in fact I’ve seen it happen on stage).

The thing is, expert musicians have the skills and tools to take care of events like the broken string. With the spare strings on hand, and basic guitar knowledge (or, you know, a crew of seasoned roadies), it’s but a moment’s work to restring, tune, and be ready to strum again.

Introducing the Website Tune-Up

When it comes to your WordPress website, things can get slow and out-of-tune if you haven’t upgraded in awhile, plus you’re more vulnerable to Internet Bad Guys if you’re using older code. And if you don’t have a backup system that automatically creates regular backups for you, it’s much harder to restore your site if something does happen to it.

I don’t want bad stuff to happen to your site, whether the cause is Internet Bad Guys or Upgrades Gone Wrong or merely a code-tweak with unforeseen consequences. I am intimately familiar with that last one, being a die-hard code-tweaker…I learned the hard way to always do a pre-tweak backup!

So I created the Website Tune-Up, a service in which I backup and upgrade everything for you. It makes you safer on two levels:

  1. You’re updated to the latest, greatest code, so you’re less vulnerable to crashes and hacks, and
  2. You have a dependable backup that happens automagically, so if something were to mess with your site, you could be up and running again with a quick restore.

“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” With apologies to Sledge Hammer fans everywhere.

The Website Tune-Up grew out of my standard list of things I do for pretty much every web client I work with, the first time I log into their WordPress dashboard.

It starts with a full backup, because I never make changes to a client’s site without a safety net.

Often, doing a backup means installing and configuring a backup plugin.

After the backup is made, everything gets upgraded to the latest and greatest. This means WordPress itself first, then plugins, then the theme if there’s a new version.

I’ll check various important settings (things like permalinks, media library folders, and discussion settings that reduce comment spam).

I also run a quick check for malware and server malfunctions, and often I end up optimizing the WordPress database to speed things up and save space.

Almost every time I do this, I notice things that could be improved — a plugin that does the job of two, or a setting that is slowing things down. These are things that are easy for me to spot and tweak, but they may never have occurred to the site owner.

WordPress Peace of Mind

If you’re ready to get upgraded to the latest and greatest, hop on over to the Website Tune-Up page.

One small detail: The Website Tune-Up actually includes a full month of upgrades, for anything that gets updated after your Tune-Up is completed. If you want ongoing upgrades by Yours Truly, you can sign up for the ongoing Peace of Mind Program for a monthly fee after your Tune-Up month has passed (but don’t worry, you’re not being automatically signed up for a monthly program that you’ll have to cancel to get out of the monthly fee — I’ll never pull a trick like that!).

WordPress 3.3 is in its final beta-testing stage, so that pink Please update now! message may be popping up on your screen sometime in November. If you want to spare yourself the dread of upgrading when the next version of WordPress is released, let me handle your upgrades and backups for you.

Get a Website Tune-Up today!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Want a WordPress site?

May 17, 2011 By

Want to declare your independence with a brand-new shiny WordPress site? You can launch it to the world by the fourth of July!

My wondertwin Amy Crook and I are all booked up for the rest of May, but we have two slots available in June and two in July for our Bonanza package (which includes custom header art and a cartoon by Amy, in addition to smooth tech sailing courtesy of yours truly).

Want to see the Bonanza package in action? Check out Amy’s original watercolor art for Maribeth Doerr of StorkNetFamily.com (those are some cute baby birds!). I installed WordPress and Maribeth’s choice of theme, added Amy’s art and custom color scheme, and Maribeth now has the freedom to add and edit content as she pleases.

I also have two slots in June and three in July for Bonus packages (which includes theme customization but not original art).

And if you want a no-frills install so you can get going quickly, you can get that for $99 with the Basic package (four slots available in June and four in July).

Complete details on all the packages are available on the WordPress Packages page.

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

But what if your WordPress upgrade fails?

May 10, 2011 By

Here’s a quick way to fix one of the most common errors when upgrading WordPress — plus reassurance that it’s not your fault.

Let’s say you follow my advice to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

You log into your WordPress dashboard and click “Please update now” in the little message at the top of your screen. Then, on the next screen, since you’re all backed up (you are, aren’t you?), you click “update automatically.”

And then the unthinkable happens: Your website disappears.

All you see is a white screen, blank except for this bland, non-reassuring message:

Say what?!?

At this point you might follow the instructions and wait a minute, but probably not. A more likely scenario is that, in an adrenaline surge of anxiety, you hit the refresh button on your browser, even though you’re worried about messing up an upgrade in progress. You might even refresh a couple of times in a row. And at some point you get this even more frightening message in the middle of your still-ominously-blank screen:

And what’s worse, there is no “OK” button to click, nor is there a “cancel” button, nor is there a Panic Button.

So, naturally, you panic.

You try to load your website — any page on your website. And you get nowhere. Then you try to reload the login page, and your anxiety levels ramp up to DefCon 1 Red Alert Battle Stations when you realize that you can’t even login to the back end of your site.

At least that’s what happened to me the first time I saw this message after a “routine” WordPress upgrade.

How to fix the “Scheduled Maintenance” error

First of all, it’s not your fault. You didn’t break anything. It’s a weird little WordPress glitch that happens to me about one in every eight upgrades (and I do quite a bit of upgrading for my various sites plus my Peace of Mind Program clients).

Second of all, there is a way you can fix it. Yourself.

You’ll need to access your website files via FTP. If you are not familiar with this process, I suggest you log into your web hosting account and look in their help section for information about FTP. Your web host may have even emailed you FTP instructions when you first signed up for web hosting.

You’ll need a piece of software called an FTP client, which is different from a web browser. You can get a free FTP client called FileZilla here if you don’t have one installed on your computer.

To login to your website, you’ll need three pieces of information:

  1. A hostname. Sometimes this is ftp.your-domain.com, but sometimes it’s a server address at your web host. This is why you need to read your web host’s specific instructions.
  2. A username. Sometimes your web host assigns you one, sometimes you have to set this up yourself.
  3. A password. Even if your web host assigns your password, you can usually change it in your web hosting account. Please take care to use a solid, secure password here, because this is a direct doorway to all of your website files.

When you login to the FTP server for your website, you’ll be looking at a list of files. Look for a file named .maintenance, a file that was created today. Whether your files are sorted alphabetically or by creation date, it should appear near the top. You may have to change your FTP client’s preferences so that you can see files whose names begin with a dot (period).

On my FTP client (Fetch, which is Mac-only and not free — but when it’s transferring a file, the cursor changes into an animated running puppy, which feature all by itself is well worth the price of the software), it looks like this:

Found that file? Good. Now delete it.

Yep, just delete it.

Now go back to your web browser and try your site URL.

Don’t reload the page with the error message, the one that has a URL that looks like this:

http://your-domain.com/wp-admin/update-core.php?action=do-core-upgrade.

You’ll just get that ominous “are you sure you want to do this?” error message again.

Instead, just reload the front page of your site.

If your site reappears, you are good! You have solved the problem! Go ahead and login to your dashboard and breathe a sigh of relief.

And that’s how to fix the “scheduled maintenance” error that sometimes happens when upgrading WordPress. If you get a different error message, or a totally blank screen with no error message at all, this fix will most likely not work. But those situations are much more rare.

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , ,

It’s World Backup Day! Are YOU backed up?

March 31, 2011 By

I just found out (via a tweet from @Ipstenu) that it’s World Backup Day!

(That page has some coupon codes for backup services, plus apparently there are some Twitter contests to win free backup packages. Smart marketing!)

If your computer isn’t backed up, consider this a friendly public service announcement reminding you that you might want to take care of that soon-ish.

And don’t forget to back up your website(s) as well — in the case of WordPress, you need to back up both your database and your actual website files in order to have a complete copy. There are several plugins that will do the job (I use a combo of WB-DB Backup for my database and WordPress Backup for my files, and there are plugins that will do both parts, but I haven’t tested them yet).

I’ll also remind you that there are a limited number of slots still available in my WordPress Peace of Mind Program, which is open for new signups until April 4. If you join this program, I will do a complete backup of your site (and schedule regular ongoing backups) as well as upgrade WordPress, your plugins and themes.

And I had no idea World Backup Day was going to happen during the enrollment period!

Filed Under: WordPress How-To's Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »