With all the major blogging platforms experiencing problems at some point over the past few months, can we really trust them with our content?
Last week, Google-owned blogging platform Blogger experienced downtime, causing frustration and panic for users across the globe. Although there were different levels of outage for different people, the disruption was largely between the 11th and 13th of May and was apparently caused by data corruption during normal maintenance work.
Yesterday the global media reported that most blogs are now fully up and running again, with only a select few still identifying problems with their content and comments.
However, this isn’t the first time a blogging platform has come up against tricky issues. Only last month Wordpress reported a security breach of sensitive data and Tumblr had significant amounts of downtime last winter, which were allegedly caused by the 4chan community. It seems no matter which blogging platform you use, you’ll have faced problems at one time or another, particularly if you blog regularly.
Pingdom created a series of tests to try and determine which platforms are generally the most consistent in the post, The most reliable (and unreliable) blogging services on the web, which interestingly named Blogger the most reliable out of the bunch when it was written at the end of last year:
1. Blogger
2. Wordpress
3. Typepad
4. Posterous
5. Tumblr
Experiencing such large amounts of downtime, particularly coupled with a loss of content and pictures, is scary for any blogger regardless of whether they use the platform as a personal journal or for business. But, it seems that downtime, loss of content and security breaches are just an unfortunate inevitability to blogging. So, instead of worrying about what might happen, the only steps we can take right now are making sure that if something does go wrong the damage is as minimal as possible.
Backing Up Content
Platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad have handy “Export” features as part of their main dashboards that allow users to save everything about their blog externally. This way if they want to move platforms or if their content is suddenly deleted, it can be simply and easily imported back again.
Tumblr doesn’t have the same simple functionality, but there is a dedicated MAC OS X Tumblr app created by the Tumblr team, which enables you to do the same thing. If you’re not running on MAC OS X then try an online service like Tumblr Backup, just fill in your details and then save all of your posts as an HTML file.
Backing Up Your Design
However, as the design of your blog is arguable just as important as your content, be sure to back up your design template whenever you make changes. Simply copy and paste it into a basic text editor, such as Notepad or Text/Edit. This is also a life-saving tip if you’re new to web editing and should help you to avoid that heart sinking feeling when you try to amend the alignment of the header and end up making everything bright pink and 1000px wide!
Backing Up Comments
All the above methods take comments into account too, but it might be worth considering a separate commenting system like Disqus that’ll keep your comments safe if something happens to your blog.
If your blog is self-hosted things are a little different. For example if you’re using a platform like Wordpress you can still export posts and a range of other aspects of your blog, but the actual structure and design will obviously need to be backed up. If you’re using Wordpress.org to host your website there’s lots of useful documentation to help you do this, or you can turn to plugins that have been specially designed to back-up everything that matters quickly and easily.
The key to backing-up your content is to do it regularly, particularly before and after you make big changes or if you know you’re going to be away for long periods of time.
Becca Caddy is a BitchBuzz Tech columnist and freelance writer. She is also the UK editor of US-based tech blog Popgadget.net. You can follow her @beccacaddy or read her blog beccacaddy.com.
Image via Kinologik’s Flickr