Guy Rutenberg

This post outlines how to create encrypted incremental backups for WordPress using duplicity and duply. The general method, as you will see is pretty generic, and I’ve been using it successfully to backup also Django sites and MediaWiki installations. You can use this method to make secure backups to almost any kind of service imagineable: ftp, sftp, Amazon S3, rsync, Rackspace Open Cloud, Ubuntu One, Google Drive and whatever else you can think about (as long as the duplicity folks implemented ). If you prefer a simpler solution, and don’t care about incremental or encrypted backups, see my Improved FTP Backup for WordPress or my WordPress Backup to Amazon S3 Script.
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In this tutorial we’ll walk through the steps of enabling SSL (https) for the WordPress’ admin panel when using Lighttpd as a webserver. The tutorial consists of two stages, the first is enabling SSL at the Lighttpd level and the second is in the WordPress level.

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This script backups both the database and files of a WordPress blog into a remote FTP server (while keeping a local copy). It’s an update of my WordPress Backup to FTP script. The main changes are auto-detecting database settings and better support for caching plugins (specifically WP-Cache). The new version makes it easier to backup multiple WordPress blogs to the same FTP server.
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I’ve ported the Fusion theme by digitalnature to RTL, and adapted it to Hebrew.

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I’ve been using the Sociable plugin for adding easy “share” links to the bottom of my posts. Up until yesterday I’ve been using the 2.x versions of the plugin, but yesterday I’ve upgraded to 3.4.4. Today I’ve noticed to my surprise that the plugin automatically adds a box to my admin dashboard with “The Latest news from Yoast”, Yoast beeing the plugin’s maintainer, Joost de Valk, blog. The plugin itself doesn’t feature any way to completely disable this “feature”. One has to hide it using the dashboard settings. While this may seems benign, in my opinion its pushing the limit. If I’m interested in getting updates from that blog, I would sign up to its RSS feed. I don’t like getting “free” functionality not advertised in the plugin description.

I must add that as a user of the Sociable plugin, I’m more than satisfied. I probably won’t stop using the plugin just because of this issue, but it still seems to me like improper manners.

Update: A newer version of the script is available.

This script allows you to easily backup your WordPress blog to an FTP server. It’s actually a modification of my WordPress Backup to Amazon S3 Script, but instead of saving the backup to Amazon S3 it uploads it to an FTP server. Another update is that now the SQL dump includes the database creation instructions so you don’t need to create it manually before restoring from the backup.

Although I’ve written it with WordPress in mind (to creates backups of my blog), it isn’t WordPress specific. It can be used to backup any website that consists of a MySQL database and files. I’ve successfully used it to backup MediaWiki installation.
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This is an updated version of my WordPress Backup Script. The new version basically does the same thing: backup up a wordpress blog (actually any site that consists of files and a MySQL database). The new thing about the script is that instead of only saving the backup locally, it also uploads it to Amazon S3.

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I’ve moved my blog in the last few days to a new bigger dedicated server (as well as some other sites I own). After doing some benchmarks (I plan to post those soon) I’ve decided to switch to Lighttpd. While the exact migration notes are the topic of another post, I can say that I’m fairly satisfied with the move.

After setting up the server, I started moving the blog. Importing the files and the database was pretty straight forward. But when I thought every thing is ready and I transfered the domain to the new server I’ve found out that none of my inner pages are accessible. The reason, as it turned up pretty quickly, is that the WordPress depends on Apache’s mod_rewrite to create the clean URLs (the so called permalinks). This actually posed two problems:

1. WordPress depends on Apache’s mod_rewrite.
2. WordPress used .htaccess files for the clean URLs configuration

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This is a small script I’ve written to automate my server-side backups of my blogs. It creates a backup of both the database and the actual WordPress files.

#!/bin/bash
 
# (C) 2008 Guy Rutenberg - http://www.guyrutenberg.com
# This is a script that creates backups of blogs.
 
DB_NAME=
DB_USER=
DB_PASS=
DB_HOST=
 
#no trailing slash
BLOG_DIR=
BACKUP_DIR=
 
 
echo -n "dumping database... "
mysqldump --user=${DB_USER} --password=${DB_PASS} --host=${DB_HOST} ${DB_NAME} \
 | bzip2 -c > ${BACKUP_DIR}/${DB_NAME}-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.bz2
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
	echo -e "\nmysqldump failed!"
	exit 1
fi
echo "done"
 
 
echo -n "Creating tarball... "
tar -cjf ${BACKUP_DIR}/${BLOG_DIR##*/}-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.bz2 ${BLOG_DIR}
if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then
	echo -e "\ntarball creation failed!"
	exit 1
fi
echo "done"

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About a week ago, I’ve decided to look at the HTML source of my blog. I was in total shock to find a spam link hidden there. This is how it looked:

<!-- ocadia theme credits, downloaded from wpthemesfree.com -->
<u id="ocadia" style="display: none">Buy some <a href="http://detoxbuddy.com/categories/191.html">marijuana drug testing</a> products</u>

Ocadia is the name of theme I’m using, so I guessed the hidden link came from there. I was partially right. The code indeed resided in the index.php file of the theme, but as I later found out, the theme had nothing to do with that. I removed link and the comment immediately, and went to see if the it was distributed this way from Beccary (the author of the theme.
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