When things are going well online, I seem to forget about what can go wrong – and the consequences.

Yesterday after I finished a post on this blog, I noticed a typo.
But instead of being able to log in to wordpress, I got the dreaded “Internal Server Error”

As soon as this message appeared I realised I hadn’t bothered to even make a backup of my posts for quite a few days.
And it’s even longer since I backed up the complete site.

WordPress is great when it’s working – but it doesn’t take much to start making things go wrong.
And making proper backups invloves MUCH more than simple backing up posts, pages and comments.
If you don’t believe me check out what the experts say!

My hosting account for this blog is with  JustHost – and one of the reasons I like them is that they provide daily backups of all my domains for just $10 a year.

Anyway, I didn’t want to lose yesterday’s work and really don’t like messing with live MySQL databases (the blog was still working fine) – so I raised a ticket asking for help.

I don’t bother to pay extra to get 30 minutesupport  response from JustHost , so they tend to take their time – but are still much faster and more helpful than other hosting providers (such as one I have been waiting 3 weeks to get blocked access to FTP and cPanel sorted)

Anyway today’s a new day and I was very happy to discover the tech guys at JustHost have sorted the problem for me – thanks guys.

Now I’m back in to my wordpress site dashboard the very first thing I need to do is create an up to date backup of my site.

I bought John Thornhill’s WSO Domination training package a couple of months ago as a downsell One Time Offer along with his One Month Mentor program.

By the way WSO stands for Warrior Special Offer.

The package consists of:

• 29 videos almost 3 hours in total – the shortest only 1 minute, the longest over 15 minutes
• 9 pdf’s varying in length between 1 and 7 pages – 35 pages in total

Now that my Header Magic has been thoroughly tested and is ready to sell I plan on following John’s advice and offer it as a WSO.

Over the year’s I have learnt how to do most things online – including the techie stuff – so I wasn’t expecting a problem – but boy, am I glad I did decide to buy WSO Domination and check it out yesterday.
Why? Well I didn’t know just how much I didn’t know about launching a WSO until I took the time to check out John’s training program.
I like John style of training – showing and explaining how to do things in plenty of detail using short videos and pdf files I can print out.

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday and I’ve been burning the midnight oil recently working on my software – so I thought I would dust off my Archos MP4 player and sit outside by the sea to watch WSO Domination and learn in a relaxed, productive state of mind.

First problem – the videos are an unusual size 700 x 526 – and not the 640 x 480 I knew was needed to play on my small Archos MP4 player – a gadget I haven’t used since having to travel each day by train a few years ago.
No problem – I powered up my trusty copy of Camtasia Studio and started converting them to 640 x 480 MP4s

Camtasia is pretty slow rendering new videos, but after converting 4, I downloaded them to my Archos only to discover it wouldn’t play that particular format of MP4!
I was pretty mad when I first paid $300 to buy the Archos MP4 player and found out that it wouldn’t actually play vidoes without forking out another 20 Euros for an encoder – and I certainly didn’t plan on paying them another 20 Euros to play a different format of MP4’s.

So back to Camtasia to change the settings to produce WMF format video.
Maybe I’m mad – but I spent the best part of 3 hours using my laptop and desktop to convert all 29 videos to 640 x 480 WMF format and download them to my Archos.

Was it worth it? Well I think so. I managed to watch half a dozen videos late last night whilst waiting at the station for my wife’s train to arrive from London.
Nowadays I seem to be a pretty slow learner. Most of the time I think I understand new things, but really need to watch or listen several times to fully understand them. Having copies of the videos on an MP4 player means I can watch and rewatch them whenever I have a few minutes of spare time – so the information eventually seeps into by brain.

I also printed each of the PDF’s – because I usually find reading these is a much quicker way for me to learn.
Just one complaint – they have no headers, footers or page numbers – so I got them into a bit of a muddle before sorting them out and stapling them together.

Today is another sunny day, my wife has a day off and I am all set to watch and rewatch the WSO Domination aideos until I really understand exactly what I need to do to launch my software.

So if you are planning to launch your first WSO anytime soon – I can hight recomment investing in John’s WSO Domination training package – it has already saved me a ton of wasted time getting started on my first WSO.

Yesterday, I finally decided to do something to stop the emails I was getting for a https://caninefriendsforlife.com/wp WordPress site I hadn’t touched for almost 2 years!

Imagine my surprise when I found 9,860 pending comments – despite having Akismet and WP-reCAPTCHA activated.
I quickly found that WordPress would only let me bulk move comments to trash a page at a time.
And my server flagged a ‘string too long’ if I set pages to more than 150 pending comments – so this would take a very long time – particularly as it was taking 30-40 seconds to move 150 comments to trash where I could delete them

So then I decided to give the ‘Check for Spam’ button a try.
This started to work – but was obviously going to take a long time – so I left it running while I got on doing some real work.

About an hour later, I checked to find and error message displayed – but all of the pending comments had been moved to trash.
And the delete trash button worked fine.

This morning I was surprised to find email still arriving – but for a slightly different version of the blog at https://caninefriendsforlife.com/blog

And when I logged into wordpress for this blog found almost 30,000 pending comments!
This blog didn’t have Akistmet or WP-reCAPTCHA activated – so although not perfect they clearly do something to help.
Anyway I decided I needed to find a better way of deleting these pending comments – and found agreat little plugin – Delete pending WordPress comments

This little plugin worked a treat deleting all 30,000 comments in seconds.
And it obviously did it’s job properly because the size of exported backup file shrunk from 43Mb to less than 1Mb

The only irritation with this plugin was that you have to type in “I am sure I want to delete all pending comments and realize this can’t be undone” to get it to work – quite a mouthful.
The pluging delevoper, Nicolas Kuttler, explains this on his site but unfortunately has locked out copying this text.
And copy and pasting the text from the plugin just wouldn’t work.
It only worked when I typed all of the text by had – a bit tediuos.

Anyway this time wasting lesson reminded me why I have drastically reduced the number of website I manage from over 600 to about 50 – and even that is too many.