There are many ways to backup WordPress, but none as easy and thorough as VaultPress. VaultPress is one of the newest Automattic projects and is definitely a powerhouse in its field.

One of the many things that sets VaultPress apart from the rest is its set it and forget it ease of use. Simply install the VaultPress plugin and watch as it begins to analyze and backup your database, plugins, themes, and uploads. After the first backup is complete, VaultPress will update your backup whenever a change is made, even for something as trivial as adjusting a setting. The result is a series of up to the minute full backups ready to be restored as soon as you need them.

In contrast, iDrive is VaultPress’ closest competitor. Though iDrive’s service starts free, you’re only allotted 2GB before a paid upgrade is required, and the backups are only generated once every 24 hours. VaultPress is not free, but space is unlimited and backups occur immediately and as often as necessary.

In addition to extensive real-time backups, VaultPress offers intuitive stats that use data from your backups to help you determine your blog’s most popular day and hour (based on % of comments received) and your blog’s most productive day and hour (based on % of posts published), and if you upgrade to a premium account, VaultPress will regularly scan your files for known exploits and threats. This is an invaluable feature for popular sites as VaultPress will notify you the minute an exploit or threat is found and you’ll be able to immediately restore from the latest clean backup.

Fortunately, I have not had the need to test the restorability of VaultPress’ backups, but I have determined by visual inspection that they seem to be complete, and several success stories have been recorded.

If you’re in need of a simple and complete backup solution, look not further than VaultPress. VaultPress is still in beta and new features are being added often. After applying for VaultPress, you’ll be placed on a waiting list until space is available, but the special beta rates are well worth the wait.

Disclaimers: VaultPress is one of our advertisers.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! from Flickr

We would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the Weblog Tools Collection team and our advertisers.

Be safe, have fun and be sure to spread the cheer!

So I was decking out my laptop with stickers the other day and realized that I really miss having a Weblog Tools Collection laptop sticker.

Weblog Tools Collection Laptop Sticker

So I got in touch with a few vendors and come upon Sticker Giant who were great to work with. Now that I have a sticker for my own laptop, I have many others left on the roll and I am itching to give them away. So if you want a Weblog Tools Collection laptop sticker for free, please fill out the form and we will send a few out for you ASAP.

Since postage is kind of expensive, if you missed this round and would still like one, we will have more of these sticker giveaways in the future and if I play my cards right, I might even have a way for people to order them online for very little money. Stay tuned for that.

If you are a tech company or blog and have stickers of your own that you would like distributed along with these, please contact me using the form in the menu above.

Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress: I have been a huge fan of related posts in blogs for some time. They really help your readers by drawing them into the conversation and increase stickiness of your blog. WordPress.com has a similar feature with related posts from various other blog on the network. Variations of the related posts plugins include our very own “Where did they go from here?” plugin and more centralized version such as the Waypath service.

The tutorial linked above explains one way to add thumbnails to your related post links in order to draw your readers attention to the links. The method is not as automated as I would like it to be and does require a few bits of code that is provided but I believe it can really help keep readers on your blog longer. I remember when small pictures were added next to AdSense ads and it raised clickthroughs to such an extent that Google had to re-examine their policy and ended up making them illegal. My suggestion is to keep the thumbnail small and relevant. Automated generation of thumbnails would be much more preferred. As part of the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition 2009, George Spyros has also released his Rich Related Posts plugin that might be of interest.

21 Great Plugins to Manage Multi-Author Blogs Efficiently: This is an interesting collection of plugins to manage multi-author blogs and add extra visibility to your co-authors. Weblog Tools Collection is a multi-author blog that is put together by highly dedicated and talented authors in various parts of the planet. We collect and put together news, information and articles throughout a 24 hour period and are probably watching over the blog and the comments in one way or another. We rarely ever meet face to face and tend to communicate via IM, email and a very rare phone call from time to time.

Some of the plugins mentioned in this list are popular such as Role Manager, which is very useful in and of itself. However, there are others that sparked immediate interest in my. The ability to add co-authors to a post would be quite cool, as would the ability to add quick information about the particular author to the various posts. Many of the larger multi-author blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch already do this (I am not sure how, but I assume there are some custom plugins involved) and now you can do the same.

Speaking of multiple authors, are you a passionate plugin picker and a theme tamer? If you are not afraid to speak to thousands of people in an instant, have confidence in your writing abilities and are interested in breaking into the blogging world with aplomb, we would like to hear from you. Tell us what you will do to make this blog better using the Contact form above.

Thanks Thrive Creative Group via WeblogToolTips

If you are a WordPress developer or designer or have been messing around in the world of WordPress for any period of time, you have by no doubt heard of WordPress hooks. Hooks are a set of custom written functions that can be added to existing functions in the WordPress core to increase, improve or remove functionality. WordPress plugins make extensive use of hooks to latch onto various portions of the WordPress themes or to the admin interface in order to provide the additional functionality or to perform certain actions in certain parts of the code. If you are looking to understand hooks, learn about all the action and filter hooks and all the deprecated hooks, find the latest changes and understand how hooks can be used in customizing WordPress, I suggest you look at Adam’s WordPress hooks database.

Smashing Magazine has listed 10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks in which they do some useful things by using the hook functionality. Many of these are already being performed by various plugins and by itself serves no new purpose. However, as a learning tool or as a catalyst for plugin authors to try new things, this list can be very useful. For example, the “Get entire post or page in a PHP variable” is similar to the technique used by Matt’s asides and later replicated in various Asides plugins written for WordPress.

WordPress Theme Development Tools.: ThemeShaper puts together a list of many of the ingredients required to develop your own WordPress themes including the test content that helps to test the demo the functionality of WordPress themes and tutorials to help beginners get started. The inclusion of useful development tools such as Firefox extensions and even links to free text editors are appreciated. The one inclusion that I would have expected from the blog of a theme framework developer would have been a list of theme frameworks that a beginner could get started with.