Self-hosting your blog opens up a lot of possibilities but more than a couple of headaches as well. If you don’t put the good folks over at Blogger or Typepad or WordPress.com in charge of managing the backend of your blog, by default that responsibility falls to you!
Of the myriad technical tasks a self-hosting blogger needs to stay on top of, the most pressing is probably security. After all, if your blog is hacked, all the other little details become moot. A member of the Nature Blog Network recently lost his site to Russian hackers. Lost it and is unable to retrieve it. Could you imagine this happening to you? Don’t let his loss be in vain. Follow his one critical piece of advice:
Always keep current with platform upgrades!
For example, if you run a blog on WordPress, you should be running some version of WordPress 2.7. If you’re running your site on version 2.5, you are vulnerable to hackers.
Of course, keeping your version current is just the tip of a massive site security iceberg. Yet, just managing this (and backing up at least weekly) will make your treasured blog much safer.
Do you have site security tips or horror stories you’d like to share?
4 Comments
Does anyone have a recommendation for how best to back up blogger content? I’ve yet to find a truly satisfactory solution.
Blogger has an import/export feature under Settings->Basic. I haven’t tried it, so I’m not sure how well it works. I have tried other backup utilities, but they worked better with the old Blogger.
The only security tip I have to share is that it is a lot easier to keep a blog platform up to date if you only use templates and modules that are regularly updated to keep pace with new platform versions. Updating these yourself is a major pain.
Every month I download my content to my server using a free program called Blogger Backup. Luckily I haven’t had cause to put it to the test yet, but I feel comfortable knowing all of my posts are relatively safe.
I use blogger back-up too Nate. The problem is I forget to use it often enough!