Managing Your Blog Like a Professional Web Site: Content Protection

Working around developers, one lesson I’ve picked up and begun to practice is creating multiple environments for my work.

For professional Web site development, it is common for the programmers to set up:

• Development server – where the raw programming is done and version control is managed.
• Staging server – where pending revisions are tested before being deployed for the public to view.
• Live server – public view.

A multi step process allows for checkpoints to hopefully identify bugs before they appear on your live site and frustrate your audience.

Why? Because in the past 15 months I’ve had a few set backs that wasted my time and caused frustration. Here are some examples that could happen to you:

• Lost/accidentally deleted files.
• Installed a WordPress upgrade and then my site became inaccessible.
• Installed a plugin and then my site became inaccessible.
• Your Web site hosting provider goes out of business suddenly and you have no way to retrieve your files.
• Something gets corrupt somehow. Remember we’re dealing with neatly organized ones and zeros. Anything can happen to disrupt them.

So I’ve created a staging environment that becomes my test bed to play with different themes, new plugins, and edits to the theme source code. I loaded it with some real data but it is essentially a non-public version of the live site. It gives me a sandbox to install updates, makes changes and generally make sure nothing breaks as a result of my tinkering. This reduces my risk and increases my confidence when I apply changes to the public site.

Additionally, I make data backups. I use a terrific WordPress plugin called WordPress Database Backup which sends a ZIP’d copy of the MySQL database to me by email weekly so a copy is saved in a Gmail account and my local email files. If anything did happen to my hosting, at least I could reconstruct the content from the latest database file.

Then every two-three months I manually copy all the live server files down and make an archive backup.

I also took steps to keep search engines from accessing the server. I don’t want that content to be indexed accidentally, nor do I want visitors to stumble upon it and think it’s the real version. A combination of modifying the robots.txt file, the .htaccess and using a nice plugin called Maintenance Mode take care of that for me.

Generally speaking, it’s more work to set all this up, but now I now have peace of mind.

How about you? You’ve invested a lot of time developing your content. Now invest some time to protect it.

I hope you find that helpful. Please let me know and share your tips.
-BD

07/20/2007 Update: A few more tips…
1. As tempting as it is to download and install software updates or patches, I always wait at least 4-5 days to see what happens to others first. I’ll check if users are complaining about problems on the developer’s Web site. If all seems fine, then I’ll proceed with the installation.

2. It’s also a good idea to make a complete backup of everything so you can roll back if there’s a problem.

3. Consider doing all your updates at once, perhaps once every month or quarter, instead of ad hoc. That frees you up to spend more time on producing quality content than maintenance.