Some time ago I was discussing backing up blogs. However, an integral part of a blog that I did not discuss is the blog’s database. Basically, if you forget to back up your blogs database, then you are going to lose a number of important elements of your blog, including your blog posts, comments, and data generated by different plug-ins. So in a sense, your database is more important then your blogs template files, as they are more easy to substitute.

To back up your database use the MySQL database administrative tool provided by your webhost, or in case of WordPress blogs use an appropriate plug-in such as “WordPress Database Backup”. This plug-in is a personal favorite of mine, as it is easy to install and has very neat features. Backup options include saving to server, downloading to your computer, and emailing the database to your email. Perhaps the most useful feature is scheduled backup that allows you to set-up the plug-in in a way that it will automatically perform scheduled backups and email your backup to a chosen email. Setting for a daily schedule will ensure that no important data will be lost, however, the weekly schedule might be more reasonable.

If you value the content of your blog, you should take some measures to ensure that your database will not be lost. It is a good idea to both manually and automatically backup your database. This way you will be sure that you will not lose any important data.

Some time ago, I read an article about blogging and there were some interesting numbers listed there. The article stated that Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, indexed around 150 million blogs, up from 100,000 just a few years ago. It seems that a new blog is created every few seconds, which adds up to thousands new blogs a day, hundreds of thousands of posts a day, and thousands of updates an hour. As you see, the growth rate of blogs is really impressive. But what are really blogs? I think that blogs are lowering the cost of publishing, enabling the rise of content, which is replacing the centralized, controlled content done by professionals. I am not saying that some bloggers do not go pro, but most bloggers are only blogging part-time. Blogs are becoming more and more popular with each passing day. One of the reasons is that very often bloggers allow their visitors to ask them questions, leave comments, etc. A user that visits a blog can actually interact with the writer and that is not possible in case of newspapers.

The article had the conclusion that blogging is still in its early days and it is analogous to where the Web was in 1995 and 1996, so it is not clear how it will turn out. However, as a blogger myself, I am predicting that the popularity of blogging will not cease to grow and some bloggers will become even more influential.

There are many blogs, which have a do-follow policy. In other words, unless a comment is a spam that will be deleted by Akismet in the first place, every person leaving a comment will get a free linkback to such a site. Such link will be detectable by Google spiders, contrary to a “nofollow” link. People often decide to have a do-follow blog as they predict that maintaining this policy will attract more visitors to their website. However, recently I started noticing that some do-follow blogs, especially those with relatively high PR go back to being non-follow. They simply get tired of people abusing the whole system. This is especially true now, when some bloggers buy comments that are difficult to spot as spam. Of course, even if somebody is going to abuse it, there will be still bloggers which will benefit from their site being do-follow. Some are afraid of spammers, but Akismet is already doing a great job filtering spam. When it comes to comments that are not of a high quality and would be suspicious, they can always be deleted manually, and thus preventing the spammer from any further spamming. Whatever you decide, it is really your choice, but remember that you should be making decisions which are beneficial to your blog and to your readers.