Those of you who are building your own freelance writing portfolio or producing a freelance writing blog to help increase your web presence may be interested to know that WordPress has released a new version. This update moves WordPress out of the 2.9.x realm that it has bee occupying for the last six months or so and brings with it numerous new features. As is standard operating procedure here, we’ll wait for a little while and see if there is any outpouring of angst before upgrading to version 3.0.
If you want to make the move to upgrade WordPress 3.0 right away, just log into WordPress administrator account and look for the link at the top of your dashboard that says Upgrade to WordPress 3.0. You should back up all of your posts and database before upgrading.
If you are like me and not very savvy about the little databases that WordPress uses, you might find it more useful to get a backup of your posts and then just restore one of the backups provided by your webhosting company.
Quick Writer’s Tip About Web Hosting: If your web host does not provide an automatic backup and restore feature by default via the control panel or dashboard interface on your website, it is a garbage webhost with terrible service just waiting to happen. Find a new host as soon as possible. (Of course, disregard this note if you are using some advanced hosting system with all of your own scripting and shell accounts and you think that web control panels are for babies.)
To get a backup of all your posts and images without having to mess with backing up and resorting the actual databases involved, use the Export menu item in Tools. If something goes wrong, you can re-install a 2.9.x version from your webhost back (or from scratch) and then do an Import to get your posts back.
That’s a little bit easier for a non-DBA like me to work with.
Happy Writing.