As happens from time to time when a great plugin is left to die, we went through the latest options for easy one-click and automated backups and have settled back on an old favorite that has been updated with increasing frequency: BackUpWordpress

So far, so good.  It will perform daily automated backups of both source files and your mysql databse.  How do you like BackUpWordpress?  Any other open-source solutions we should check out?

Zarrella says the right Twitter strategy depends in part on what your goals are. Want to accumulate as many followers as possible? Then tweet a lot: Twitter’s A-listers — those with the most followers — tweet an average of 22 times a day, and more tweets generally lead to more followers. But if your goal is to drive more traffic to your site, you should show a little more restraint; accounts that share two or more links an hour show a dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one.

It’s an inexact science, but at least it’s an attempt at science where so much social media strategy is driven by intuition. (Zarrella complains about the the “unicorns and rainbows” strategy: “Love your customers, hug your followers, engage in the conversations. It sounds like good advice, and it’s hard to disagree with,” he says. “But generally, it’s not based in anything substantial.”)

After collecting more than two years of data, Zarrella shared his findings Tuesday in a webinar called “The Science of Timing.” That science is less about when and more about when not — what he calls “contra-competitive timing.” The trick is to reach people when the noise of the crowd has died down.

mysqlcheck -Aor -u YOUR-LOGIN-ID -p

This will automatically repair and optimize all of your mysql databses and tables.  Pretty neat!  This worked well for me on bluehost.

Solution: Check your memory settings in php.ini.  This setting did the trick for me.

memory_limit = 128M

Just place the above line in a blank text file, save it as php.ini and upload it to your WordPress directory.

As you know, we love WordPress so this was fun to watch.  Interested in setting up your own site on WordPress? Say HI!

We just tried it on one of our feeds and things seem to be humming along again. Give it a try if you’re having a problem with Twitterfeed.

The problem: the RSS feed was not validating properly, thus showing as blank in reputable browsers like Firefox and Chrome.  We used Feed Validator to troubleshoot the feed, which found an invalid character in one of the posts:

XML parsing error: <unknown>:81:1: not well-formed (invalid token)

 

 

Deleting the bad character–probably an artifact from cutting and pasting rich text from email–solved the issue.  Hope this helps others with empty RSS feeds.