Secure and backup your Podcast Website! – PHD065

Podcast Help Desk

First thing. I want to say THANKS to Steve and Dave Lee from Modern Life Podcast Network for the opportunity to have Podcast Help Desk there as a trial. We decided that PHD wasn’t really a good fit for the network as I’m promoting my own stuff and I wasn’t so much a part of the network as the other shows there. That being said, I enjoyed being affiliated with MLN. So much so, I’m re-starting a long-dead show which will be on MLN fully. Geek of the North will be on MLN starting next week. Steve and I did a little intro show to get the feed started over there. I still have the domain name so I pointed it at the network page where it will live. Check it out over at GeekOfTheNorth.com News: Google Play is now taking submissions of podcasts to go into the google play store and their podcast listening app that will be coming out in about 4 months. (YES, 4 Months). So no hurry, but check it out if you want to submit your RSS feed to them. http://g.co/podcastportal Soundcloud: Something is happening over there and I don’t really know if it’s incompetence or just plan old dirty pool, but, for some reason, they are changing the links to people's media files in their feeds. I had a podcaster who was using powerpress for her podcast and using soundcloud as a media host. All of a sudden, with no warning, her media file links all changed. That broke her podcast. We figured it out. I’m not sure, but it seems as though Soundcloud is trying to push everyone using them for hosting back to using the feed that soundcloud owns, not your own feed. Yet another reason to use a PODCAST media host like Blubrry.com. NMX - Rick Calvert has been heard from. He sent an email to everyone that had a VIP ticket telling them that he just checked out for a while, and is now back. We still don’t know if NMX is coming back next year. I hope so, as it’s a great place to hang out with a bunch of podcasters in one place. ---------------------- BACKUP YOUR SITES! I had a bit of a scare this week as I was moving everything back to podcasthelpdesk.com from modern life podcast network. I deleted the folder on my webhost by accident. I then realized that I had not been backing up my wordpress database!! Well, Good thing is, my database lives somewhere other than the folder that PHD’s website was in. After contacting my webhost, they told me about “history mode” in the file manager. So I went back a day and restored the folder, but it made me think of both security and backing up. So, here is a list of the things I do at PHD to keep it secure and backed up: Plugins I use for security in wordpress: Disable XML-RPC I’m not really sure of the geeky reason this is important but it does eliminate another way your wordpress can be hacked. It’s enabled by default in wordpress now. Read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML-RPC Limit Login Attempts This simply limits the login attempts so that a brute force attack can not work on your login. Rename WP-Login.php This lets you change the login page to anything you want. NOTE: it says it’s not maintained but it works fine. For backup I do 2 things. I manually backup the folder where my wp install lives. I do this once a month or so. This saves the files and whatnot, but not the database. Not sure it’s needed, but from now on I’m doing it. WP-DB-Backup by Austin Matzko - This is a Plugin. I have this run once a week and email me a backup of the database to a gmail account. That way I have a recent database backup. this is in case I have to reinstall wordpress. Then I can copy my wp-content and everything back in and be back up and running quickly. ------------------------- Blubrry Tip of the week Get your RSS feeds into the blubrry directory. Especially if you host with blubrry. ------------------------ Launch strategy 101. You will hear from some so-called Podcast Gurus that you need to launch with at ...