I’m declaring the 13th of each month as the unofficial blog backup day. Meaning that you should login to your blog software and download a backup of all posts. Also, if you have access to the template files, back those up too.

Avoiding issues are much easier than trying to fix them once they happen. I’ve never seen a blog just delete itself, but I have heard of people’s hosting accounts suddenly having a hardware failure and are non-recoverable. If you don’t have a backup of your files, who does?

Yes, a good host will make backups, but that’s placing your trust fully in a third party. What if their backups are in the same office as your website and they have a fire? All is lost. If you do have a good host, then a secondary set of backups never hurt and you’ll have them at your fingertips at all times.

Ok, so this is a perfect gloom post for Friday the 13th, but you must realize that technology isn’t perfect. Your blog could go down and if you have no backup, then you’ll have to start from zero. All your hard work down the drain.

How do you backup a blog?

For Wordpress blogs, use the the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin is included with all installs of Wordpress starting with version 2 I believe. Once enabled, you just go tot he backups section of the manage screen, make a few selections and it’ll backup your blog posts to your desktop or email. I wouldn’t suggest backing up to the server as that won’t do you any good if your web server goes down.

For Wordpress.com blogs, click on Manage and then Export.

With TypePad just got to the Import/Export area on the Manage tab of your admin area. Here you’ll be able to export all posts to your desktop. [backup support page]

Movable Type users can login to their admin area and click on Import/Export and then select Export.

Blogger doesn’t allow an export of all your posts like other services. However, you can edit your template with a bit of custom code to output all posts on one page, then save that page and revert back to your old template. Not the best solution but it should work. [Blogger How-To Page]

I know it sounds odd, but Macromedia Adobe recently announced Contribute 4 and one of the key features is blogging. Contribute as desktop publishing software? Yep.

According to Contribute’s website, the application now supports MetaWeblog which means it should work with Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and many others.

At first thought, Contribute doesn’t seem like your average blogging application and that’s because it isn’t. Contribute has worked its way into many workplaces as WYSIWYG website editing software. It was a great solution for those that wanted to edit their website, yet steer clear of the technical aspect of a website.

It’s that pre-built user base that makes integrating blogging capability the perfect next step. Teaching clients how to blog can be a challenge. There is a new interface, a new login/admin area and a whole new system to learn. With Contribute, that learning curve is lessened as they already know how to use the software and may already be comfortable using it.

It took me by surprise at first but adding blogging capabilities to Contribute seems to be then ext logical step. Not only are we installing more and more blogs for clients, but we also already use Contribute to let clients control their own content. This is just the next logical step in Contribute’s evolution.

Blogger is one Google application that is way behind the times and yesterday they announced that they are finally starting to catch up. However, I think it could be a little to late.

So what’s new? Finally Blogger is starting to support categories, I mean labels. Taking a tip from Gmail, Blogger is using labels as it’s organization system. I think this is good for Gmail users to understand how to organize information, but non Gmail users may find it extremely confusing. Why don’t they just call it categories?

Another great improvement is instant publishing. No more publishing icon that never stops. This is one big reason I left Blogger. Publishing sucked as it never seemed to complete half the time.

More feeds and feed controls are also added. There are post feeds, blog comment feeds and per-post comment feeds. All with the ability to show no feed, short or full descriptions.

Template customization is also much easier now as you can edit your template without knowing HTML. Just drag and drop elements into place. This is great for the non-technical and I can see Google widgets coming in the future.