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Interview with Marvin Tumbo, CEO of Socialight Media LtdInterview with Marvin Tumbo, CEO of Socialight Media... Marvin Tumbo is C.E.O of Socialight Media Kenya, Digital Strategist, Social Media practitioner, Entrepreneur, Blogger and a writer. We interviewed this entrepreneur to get insight on how he started his social media company and how he has used social media to get ahead in his company and personal life.                   gachigi.com:...

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7 ways to make your site Bullet Proof for Free7 ways to make your site Bullet Proof for Free The other day i talked about keeping your wordpress site from being hacked. On the list we had the option to back up your site and it got me thinking, do most people know how to back up with wordpress? Since there are so many people I know using wordpress for business or personal sites I thought it would be prudent to cover some basic tools that protect your wordpress content...

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5 Best Practices to stop hacking.5 Best Practices to stop hacking. I read the other day that WordPress sites are being hacked. It would definitely drive me mad if this happened to me. I am sure am not the only one who finds backing up very boring. But it has to be done. This issue made me think of the 5 best practices to keep your WordPress blogs from being hacked: Make sure to sign up with the best host you can afford. As much as you...

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Google+ InviteGoogle+ Invite Have you looked at google Plus (+), visit  www.plus.google.com. Google+ is a  social network operated by Google, Inc., launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products, such as Buzz and Profiles. The key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing. Google+, so far, has a much more streamlined places for interactivity.  It actually...

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Android Developer Challenge — Sub-Saharan Africa: Finalists (ADC-SSA)Android Developer Challenge — Sub-Saharan Africa:... Am sure you are wondering why am blogging about a developer challenge…well its because I love to see my country and Africa advance. The Android Developer Challenge-Sub Sahara Africa is a challenge for developer to create applications, which are built on android. It started on April 15th, 2011 and the submission of applications was to be done by end of July 1st, 2011. Well...

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Aug

29

7 ways to make your site Bullet Proof for Free

Posted by Gachigi | Comments: (2)

Category : Blogging, Education, News

Tags: , , ,

The other day i talked about keeping your wordpress site from being hacked. On the list we had the option to back up your site and it got me thinking, do most people know how to back up with wordpress?

Since there are so many people I know using wordpress for business or personal sites I thought it would be prudent to cover some basic tools that protect your wordpress content and data.

BackUp WordPress

photo acquired from loritisot.com

Most of these plugins we will talk about can be loaded from your WordPress Dashboard. Go to Plugins and select Add New and Type in the word “BackUp”. You will find a list of more than 10 backup tools, having chosen ones with good ratings, lots of downloads and some i have gotten a chance to test.

Here are the 7 plugins that you can easily add to back up your blog posts, pages and overall site in no particular order.

  1. Simple WordPress Backup promises a one-click backup process. Its name tells the story and Creates a full dump of your WordPress MySQL Database.You can check the installation here. Simple. 4 ratings, 15,832 downloads
  2. WP S3 Backups must be run on a Linux server. Other than that, this plugin will let you easily and automatically back up important parts of your WordPress install to the Amazon S3 Cloud. You can check the installation here.  10 ratings, 4,542 downloads.
  3. Online Backup for WordPress allows you to easily back up your entire WordPress database to your email, desktop or free 100MB on this plugin creator’s secure server. It will backup a site’s settings, pages, posts and comments, as well as media, attachments, themes and plugins. Its features include compression, encryption, scheduling and on-demand backup.Installation here. 17 ratings, 30,218 downloads.
  4. BackUpWordPress offers a simple automated backup of your WordPress powered website. It will back up your entire site including your database and all your files daily. One of its great features is it super simple to use, no setup required. Installation here. 81 ratings, 125,465 downloads.
  5. WP-DBManager is probably one of the most popular backup tools. It allows you to optimize a database, repair a database, back up a database, restore a database and more. It supports automatic scheduling of backups and optimizing of databases. Installation here. 222 ratings, 496,765 downloads.
  6. XCloner – Backup and Restore is designed for PHP/Mysql websites. Many WordPress installs reside in one of these types of structures. It works as a native plugin for WordPress and Joomla. Installation here. 58 ratings, 54,820 downloads.
  7. WP-DB-Backup has the highest number of downloads of any backup tool. WP-DB-Backup allows you to easily back up your core WordPress database tables as well as other tables in the same database. Installation here. 462 ratings, 1,095,302 downloads.

Before using all this Backup tools on your site i do advice that you test them on a dummy site to avoid breaking your wordpress site.

Let us know in the comments what tools or services you are using to back up and protect your WordPress data.

 

Aug

26

5 Best Practices to stop hacking.

Posted by Gachigi | Comments: (0)

Category : Blogging, Education, News

Hacker

I read the other day that WordPress sites are being hacked. It would definitely drive me mad if this happened to me. I am sure am not the only one who finds backing up very boring. But it has to be done.

This issue made me think of the 5 best practices to keep your WordPress blogs from being hacked:

  1. Make sure to sign up with the best host you can afford. As much as you may think you have an affordable hosting, remember cheap can be expensive.
  2. Keep your WordPress install (and plugins) up-to-date. Updating is easy as ever, as it usually takes just few clicks (after getting a successful backup). Can’t do it yourself? Let us know.
  3. Back it up. There are methods to keep your site backed up.Go to the plugins section and search for a backup plugin, pick one and you’ll sleep better at night should something ever go wrong.
  4. Check those permissions. Make sure your WordPress files and folders have the proper permissions. While some hosts have these correct, it never hurts to be sure.
  5. Secure. Remove unused plugins and themes that may have holes in them. Consider adding plugins, such as 5G firewall to help deter hackers.

Have you been hacked and what was your experience? Please share with us.

 

Jul

11

10 Reasons to Self Host Your Own Blog

Posted by Gachigi | Comment: (1)

Category : Blogging, News

Well I’ve been hosting my blog for some time now and i do appreciate the fact that am hosting it myself. Sometimes you don’t have money to get hosting but you would like to self host. Well maybe an easy way is to share the cost of hosting with your friends. For example if you useHostgatoras a hosting company, you get the option of unlimited domain, emails and other cool stuff. Check their site here.

self host blog

The other day i did a write up of how to self host your blog. Today am giving you the advantages of doing so. Here goes:

  1. You gain more Respect and Control.

    2. When you have free hosting, people tend to think that you are doing it to just pass time but when you invest in your own hosting it gives the impression that you are serious about the blog. Control comes in when you put in your content and run the blog. You will find with free hosting, advertisements are run by the hosting company but you have a chance of earning money using google  adsense while self hosting.

  2. Choice of Domain.

    3. The choice of Domain for free hosting depends on the hosting company e.g. for blogger you can have “http://www.gachigi.blogger.com” or for wordpress “” but when it come to self hosting you can purchase a domain that suits you e.g http://www.gachigi.com.

  3. Ease of adaption and change of site.

    4. Basically i love this part. I can change the use of the site. If you wan to add a forum for your audience to interact, you can a shopping cart and start selling items on the blog and you can add sub-directories on this same blog. I have done this with my blog and then decided against it.

  4. Freedom of design.

    5. When you use free hosting you are not able to change the design of the site. I’ve tried this on blogger but it seems to give me the same designs. by self hosting you are able to change the design or even add to the design. I love wordpress self hosting because it has so many themes and add on such as widgets and menus.

  5. Unlimited Email Accounts

    6. Unlimited email is the normal with many of the hosting companies like Webfaction and Hostgator. By this it means you will be able to create as many email accounts as you want and you are not limited to only 5 or less.

  6. You encourage comments.

    7. Sites that are Free hosted like blogger will not allow you to leave a comment with logging in with your email address which become too tedious but with self hosting you just need to add your details or if the sit eis using disqus you can log in using Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and Yahoo

  7. Get free advertising credit

    8. You have heard of google ads and facebook ads, well some hosting companies will give you free advertising credit for these sites so that when you are done making your site you can advertise it. You will never get this with free hosting e.g 000webhost.com

  8. Unlimited Pages

    9. Paid hosting has this one particular advantage that i like, because am able to make as many pages as i want especially for wordpress and you can delete and format as you wish.

  9. Different plugins

    10. Am running a self hosted wordpress blog and this allows me to download plugin that enhance my site but in the case of free hosting you might not be able to do that the exception i have see is 000webhost which is a free hosting that allows you to upload aself hosted wordpress site.

  10. Selling Rights

    11. If you are lucky enough to have a very good blog or website that is self hosted you might be able to sell this blog to someone else or a company if you don’t want to go one writing for the blog or a company may offer to buy it. I’ve seen some sites online auctioned and bloggers have made some money from it.

Do you have any other reasons why we should self host our blogs. please feel free to add it here. Check out also our 6 Months WordPress hosting giveaway coming soon.

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