Announcing, Blogging with WordPress for Beginners, an Online Course

I’m pleased to announce that the course, Blogging with WordPress for Beginners, has been released to The Polyglot Developer courses portal.

So what does this course attempt to accomplish?

If you’re interested in starting a blog to represent your brand and grow your audience, you’ll see how to do this using WordPress, a popular content management system (CMS), and a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Backup WordPress Database And Filesystem Data On Linux With Scripts

If you’re like me, you run a WordPress blog and are terrified of the thought of something going wrong. With core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, and server component updates, there is a lot of room for error. This is where a WordPress backup could help ease your mind.

WordPress recommends taking a backup of your blog before any of these are done and there are even some popular plugins that will do this for you. For example, you could use the popular UpdraftPlus or similar, but I believe there is room for error in those as well. While I could be wrong, I think WordPress must be in good shape for backup plugins to be successful.

The alternative would be to create your own backup scripts that run on a cron schedule. We’re going to see how to do this for WordPress instances running on a Linux machine.

Migrate Your WordPress From Bluehost To Digital Ocean

Bluehost is a great service that is incredibly cheap, but depending on the amount of traffic that you receive, a Bluehost server may not be able to accommodate in performance. For example my WordPress blog, the one you’re on now, receives too much traffic, which is why I had to host it on a VPS service. In particular I’m hosting this WordPress blog on Digital Ocean. Now, not everyone needs more than Bluehost so don’t think it is a bad service from the start.

Here we’re going to look at migrating a WordPress blog from Bluehost to a Digital Ocean virtual private server (VPS).

Install WordPress On Bluehost In Minutes

Previously I explained how to install WordPress on a Digital Ocean VPS Droplet. Now Digital Ocean isn’t for everyone because not everyone wants to manage their own sever. There is nothing wrong with this because there are easier solutions out there that will more than likely accomplish what you need.

This time I’m going to explain how to install WordPress on Bluehost shared hosting.

Install WordPress On A Digital Ocean VPS Droplet

I created this blog not too long ago in an effort to help developers, system administrators, and even bloggers. As many of you know, I’m using Digital Ocean to host this WordPress blog because it gives me the performance I need for the amount of traffic I receive.

In case anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, I’m going to walk you through getting WordPress up and running on a Digital Ocean Virtual Private Server (VPS) Droplet. However, this tutorial will work on any VPS that meets the operating system requirements I set, not just Digital Ocean.

Blacklist Malicious Bots And Crawlers From WordPress

The internet can be an awful place sometimes. Let’s say you created a website or blog with WordPress that recently became popular and are now getting a ton of traffic. If it hasn’t happened already, you’re going to get a lot of bad traffic mixed in. By bad traffic I mean bots and crawlers that probably don’t benefit your WordPress site because it isn’t real human traffic or well established search engine crawlers.

There are a few good ways to blacklist these bad and potentially malicious bots and crawlers from even accessing your WordPress site. We’re going to take a look at how to do this through the Apache .htaccess file.

My First Year Of Blogging And The Stats Around It

One year ago from today, I started this code blog. I set off to help people with niche topics that I myself banged my head when trying to solve.

Through the months, I’ve gotten more traffic, followers, comments, and even job offers. Here are the stats to reflect my journey as a blogger.