Backup Your Website
1-31-2019 Billy Newman
Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link Backup Your Website
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About http://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
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Produced by Billy Newman and Marina Hansen
Link
Website Billy Newman Photo https://billynewmanphoto.com/
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/billynewmanphoto
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/billynewmanphotos/
Twitter https://twitter.com/billynewman
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/billynewman/
About https://billynewmanphoto.com/about/
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast for January 31, 2019. Thanks a lot for tuning into the program. Today, I wanted to do a podcast that kind of goes over a couple subjects of like the some of the web stuff that I’m trying to put together right now. And I know it’s probably like, a lot of what I talk about on this on this podcast outside of the photo stuff, but like, it’s some of the website development stuff that I’m trying to understand and trying to get into more. I’ve been working with WordPress for the last couple years, just today, I was going through my old journals of stuff, where I was looking at, like some of the work that I’ve been doing a couple years ago back in like 2013 2014. And that’s sort of when I first started getting into WordPress as the like content management system that I’d be using to do like website editing. And I think that was like back in the fall of 2013. I think before that I had been using Squarespace for a couple of years. So I think I started first putting together my site like Billy Newman dotnet, and Billy Newman photo.com, back in like, probably 2009 or 2010, when I first started jumping into that, and that was all built on Squarespace at the time, which really, I think, has improved since then, but have like a lot of rudimentary elements to it that I don’t think I really liked as much as I thought it would like some of the wiziwig editing systems in it weren’t really as developed as I might have hoped they’d be. And if I had understood, I might have been working on WordPress from an earlier point in that I had like a wordpress.com site for a while. But really back in like 2008 2007 2008 2009, it was just not as developed as it is now there was really a big leap forward and probably 2012 and 2013. When I think it was bootstrap that that came out when we’re maybe at least that’s kind of what I know it by. But when websites started becoming more reflowable, or when websites started becoming more mobile-friendly, so you can pull them up on a mobile page and then also pull up a version of the site on a desktop app and have both of them display pretty well and have them reflow the text in a way that made sense, have them change the sizes of the images in a way that would work well. So it’s interesting to kind of see how the internet evolved over over time. But But I remember in 2013 in the fall, I got hired on to a company and one of my jobs there was to sort of re engineer and rebuild the the web experience that they had. And they had like some some weird custom PHP site, those built probably back in like the year 2000 is what it seemed like it was, it was a really strange website. But but I went through and I, I took a lot of the information that was there and then kind of had to rebuild all of it, and how to rebuild some of the visuals and the portfolios and stuff for it. And it’s still used today, I don’t think they’ve really even updated it that much, since as I build it back in 2013 2014, then it was really only a couple months to put it together. So I put that site together. And that’s really like how I had kind of learned how, wow, 300 a lot right now. I’m outside, I’m on my own and I and it’s like, it’s been raining the last three days, like pretty hard, but it just kicked up again, pretty strong. I wanted to go on a walk, no chance of that. So back to the story. I was doing WordPress development at at that company I worked for and at the same time I was trying to learn WordPress development like for my own sites and sort of as a hobby for my myself, you know, try and get into, which is really cool. And it’s it’s definitely like an incredible skill to have. I mean, like when you can know how to like edit and build pages for the web. I mean, that’s, that’s so much like, what a lot of the content stuff that’s being built this decade has been. So it was pretty cool getting to, to understand that at a deeper level. And really, I mean, it’s probably still rudimentary level if you’re actually a programmer, or someone that that, you know, works as a developer for the internet full time. But what I was trying to do was, like learn how to use a WordPress theme, use the content management system in the background and try and like put together websites that looks good. And we’re reflow been a kind of modern look to them that like showed a lot of different content in a way that seemed to clean and seem clear. And I think I learned a good way of doing that. But but there’s like just so many levels to it. It’s weird when you when you kind of find out like oh, once you do understand it, there’s just so many additional levels of that to get into like expertise level or, or just like how how things are built, how things are structured. Like if it’s fast enough, like you can build it in a way that looks good, but then it’ll be slow. And it won’t really like load correctly or like the way that things update over time, which is something I think I might have been talking about yesterday even where or like problems with some of the plugins and some of the themes that I had caused my site to not be functional anymore. So you know, just kind of interesting, like troubleshooting things that you run into, but, but over time, like I kind of figured out some stuff about WordPress and how to put it together. So I like the way that my sites are put together Now, right now, there’s still like so many things it’s like lacking and is sort of missing out on.
So I’m trying to go through this January and then now in February a little bit and do some redesign stuff on the building human photosite, like add some additional contents and additional features that I’ve sort of been putting off for, for the last couple of years, because I kind of thought I didn’t really need it there. And it’s probably true at the time, I didn’t really need it there. And there’s not an attraction, you know, as these podcasts and outside of some of the video, or the video and the photo archives that I was trying to put up on the site. It wasn’t it was really used too much, which is Okay, it looks nice, it shows this stuff fine. But I’m trying to go through now to make it 2019 2019 ready for some of this stuff. And in addition to that, I’m trying to build a couple additional sites, a couple extra sites. So I bought a, I’ve been also working on a podcast outside of this one called the night sky podcast. And it’s all about like astronomy and sky watching. And so I host that site or host that podcast, excuse me, I host that podcast on this website on Billy Newman photo.com. But I bought a domain name at night sky podcast calm. And so I’m trying to build a pretty simple WordPress site that can host a lot of the information about that podcast about that project as a whole. So it’ll be pretty basic. And it’s it’s not supposed to be something that’s, that’s usually complicated by any means. But I’m interested in, you know, trying to try to make some different graphics and make some explanation of the podcast, sort of how it works just to kind of differentiate it a little bit. And so it’s just like a side project and a hobby, I’m trying to put it together. But I’ve been trying to find out some ways to do that in an easier way. So I’ve already built about three or four pretty usable WordPress websites. And what I was hoping to do is trying to try to take a lot of that, that work that I had already done, and then migrate that over to this new night sky podcast website that I’m trying to put together. Along with another site that I’m trying to put together, I’ll get to could probably talk about that in the next podcast. But through this nightscape podcast website, what I was hoping to do was take like a lot of the way that I’ve customized the theme that I’m using and a lot of like the Page Layout stuff that I’ve already put together for let’s see my Billy Newman photo website. And I want to try and find a way to migrate that over to this night sky site, and then strip out the parts that won’t be the same, you know, I’ll replace the graphics replace a lot of the layout stuff in a way that would be unique and bespoke to the way that I want this nightscape podcast website to go. But it’s a little better than ours, it’s a lot less work, it saved me a ton of time, so that I don’t have to go back through and make customizations to each of the the fields associated with the site in a way that would be like brand new to it. So. So I’m trying to learn about that a little bit. What I’ve been trying to do is find out, I guess, different ways to do that. And so one thing that I ran into, while I was trying to do a bunch of this troubleshooting on my site over the last couple of weeks, was that I’m really in need of making backups of my WordPress sites. And so what I what I went through and did is I made sure there’s there’s ways within WordPress to do this, but I was using a plugin. That’s and you should let me know if anybody’s listening out there. And they’ve had experience doing backups at their WordPress site, you should let me know it was the most effective there’s, there’s like the cPanel backup that I’ve made from the server side where I backed up the files that were associated with the website. And so hopefully that can be restored in a way that would be useful. But there’s also some complications that I think I’ve run into with that. And it wasn’t really as user friendly as I wanted it to be and the restore points. I don’t know; it didn’t really feel like it worked for me as well as I had hoped it would. But it did come in use. It was very useful for me to do that
when I did run into problems, and I was unable to access the site. So I’m glad I had those backups of the cPanel. But
I do still have access to the WordPress dashboard of my website, what I’m hoping to do is use this plug in system that I found. And I’m sure like a million other people, according to what it said, have found it also. But I’m using this plugin called Updraft Plus to try and make to try and make backups of my WordPress pages. So I went through and I made backups of each of the WordPress websites that I’ve created so far. And first, that was the Billy Newman photo.com website. And then in addition to that, there was gold on our wedding Comm. So I made backups of the both of those. And then there’s another two websites that I’m still kind of working on. And I want to I want to try and make those new. But I did make backups of those also. And I was able to save those on my server. But I was also able to download those to my local drive and put those on on an external hard drive. And the great thing is is that I conversion, those backups. So when I make adjustments or when I make updates to my site, and I want to make another backup of it, it’ll make I can make a backup and then I can download that and then would be like the up, you know, this was in January 2019. But with all these extra pieces of content and with all these extra additions to the side, this will be the backup, I’m making February 2019, something like that. What I’m trying to figure out those. And I think what I’ve discovered is that, what I want to do is make a backup of my WordPress site, let’s say in this case, the Billy Newman photo.com backup, and I want to use that to clone and then migrate that over to the night sky podcast.com website. And so I think I found a way to do that even within Updraft Plus now, the Updraft Plus plugin offers a premium service where you can purchase the ability to do a database migration for I think, $30, it’s not $30 per site, but I think it’s $30 for the plugin, and then you get support from that plugin developer for some period of time, I think it’s like six months on the low end. And then and then if you need support for a longer amount of time, I think it’s more money than that. There’s probably some caveats to it. But that is an option that I’m trying to explore right now as if I’d want to go through that process of using the Updraft Plus plugin, to do a migration on my site where I can bring in a lot of the theme customizations, the theme itself and the, I guess, the database with the updated database, over to the night sky podcast website. And it could be an easy sort of one click solution for it. But I’m also trying to look around and see if there’s other ways for me to do an import for a clone of the website, and the website data so that I can bring in a lot of the information, but maybe leave out a lot of pieces that I won’t need, because I’m not really trying to make an exact duplicate or an exact copy, I’m just trying to bring over certain elements that would that would be that have already been adjusted in a way that I don’t really want to do the work over for. So if I could just kind of bring in this draft of a website version, that’s almost everything complete in the way that I want. And then delete the content that was on the blog, delete the pieces that were you know, over in this section of the site, rewrite and about page and a couple paragraphs over here, recreate some graphics, and then I would have what would seem like a familiar sight, it would be on-brand. But it would also be, you know, a new site that would have a lot of new content on it. And it would just kind of remain the way that I wanted it to. So that’s sort of the hope that I’m trying to go for. And I guess that the Updraft Plus plugin creates, like XML files for you to use. And
I don’t know how it really works. But I think if you break open the file that you’ve downloaded, you can go through and then and then there’s an alternate way of making an upload for that sort of stuff. But I guess the problem is, is like the database. So if you’re migrating a site, it’s really expecting all those domain names to be what they had been in the past and not migrated, or not a set of new links that have this new domain names, everything’s going to link back to another site, that it’s not, it’s not ad. So the database, I was just not going to make sense. And I think that’s what this migration tool is supposed to help you do. So I’m looking into that. And I’m hopeful that that I can kind of put that together pretty quickly. I’m also trying to be conscious of my time a little bit too, so that I don’t spend like a huge amount of time and development trying to figure out, you know how to how to go through and fix a bunch of errors that might be created, if I try and do a restore of a backup or a clone of my other site and try and migrate that over to this new domain. I’m trying to figure out a way where I don’t have to really worry about that all all that much. But I’m still going to do some more research. It’s going to be an ongoing project, an ongoing project, and I will update you in this podcast on my progress. That’s what I figured. So I’m gonna do that with another site, too. I think I mentioned it yesterday that we’re starting the golden hour experience podcast. And we’ve also started the golden hour experience.com website. And so I’m going to try and go through the same process over on that side. So I can import a bunch of the settings that I have from golden hour wedding comm and try and put it together in a way so that I get to save a bunch of time and not have to redevelop a WordPress site from scratch again. So that’s in good work, it seems like if I pay just a little bit of money, I can make it work, which might make it worth it. I figured the other news that I was gonna get to was some stuff about ebooks. I’m sure you’re excited now. Thanks for listening to all this. So I have been working with the books app on iTunes, or I guess it’s not it, it’s I guess it’s in the App Store. You know, when you go to the iOS app store, and then you pull up books, it used to be called iBooks. And there used to be another program called the iBooks Author that would help you create books. They’ve kind of streamline that stuff, and they’ve kind of gotten rid of a few features. So now, instead of a separate app, it’s all all those features are now built into pages just as it is that the free app pages that you can get for your Mac or that you can get for your iPhone, which is really cool. You can do a lot of stuff just From your iPhone. So what I’m going to try and do and what I’ve been working on for a little bit was, I want to try and create like a bunch of books that would go up for the iPad and for the iPhone. And I’m sure I’m gonna make a ton of those as free books. And then I want to try and make a few of them as, as like paid products to, which is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time way back in, like 2011, and 2012, and 2013, I’ve been working on a couple ebook projects, most of those were PDF-based, because at the time, I didn’t really like the Epub format. And I didn’t really like the lack of, I guess a graphic customization that you could do it was it was really good for like reflowable texts if you wanted to put an ebook on your Kindle. But it didn’t really seem as good for something like, like a magazine layout, that would be really heavy image based content. So I’m trying to look at that and sort of see what I can do in an interesting sort of easy way. But what I’m going to probably do is take my first book, Western overland excursion that I put together back in 2011, and 2012, on on some of those road trips that I was doing. And I’m going to take all the spreads from that book and lay those out as as a books, app book, and throw that up on to the storefront there and I don’t know, I might use it. Probably using all the wrong words for this, I think it’s pretty close. But I think you understand I want to put it in the books store on iOS, or at least on the Apple App Store. Does that make sense? I don’t know if it makes sense at all. But what I’ve gone through to do was a I tried to put in some information to iTunes Connect. If you’re if you’re not like a content creator for that’s using like Apple stuff, you might not know about iTunes Connect, but iTunes Connect is sort of the back end piece. Like if you wanted to sell your music, and you wanted to put it up in the iTunes Store back in the day. Or now, if you want to put it in Apple Music, you would use, I think, something like iTunes Connect to try and get your music delivered there. And also similar to this podcast here, if you wanted to put up a podcast on to iTunes, what you would do is create an iTunes Connect account. And then you would submit the RSS feed for your podcast to iTunes Connect. And that’s sort of how they would go over their look at then they would approve that podcast. And that’s how it ended up in the podcast app. On the podcast
store. I guess I don’t I guess you don’t make purchases, but in the podcast directory. And so in addition to that, they are like, I guess if you wrote an app, I think that’s how you would also submit it to the App Store. And that’s where you like put in your payment information and your tax information. If you’re putting up an app to sell, or if you’re putting up another piece of content to sell like your music, or in this case, like like an ebook. So that’s what I’m going to try and do. So I’ve just kind of finished some of the stuff around iTunes Connect, to put together my tax information for my business and put together some information around like the book stuff. So I’m ready to submit book projects, to the App Store. So that I can throw those out, which would be cool. So I can do free ones. And I can do paid books all at the same time. And I’m looking forward to I think it’d be kind of an interesting way to put together some of those books and throw them up on iOS devices and on Mac devices and stuff. So that’s something I’m looking forward to what I’m going to do pretty soon as grab that I think I have the original files to offer for some of these ebooks that I put together. Right? Almost, I guess more than half a decade ago, you know, it’s almost a decade ago soon. It’s crazy that we’re coming in so far to the end of the the arts is that what they call this decade, the teens, they don’t call it the teens, and then they call it the arts. But maybe I’m wrong about that maybe this is the teens, and maybe the last one was the arts, is that right? You guys can correct me. But I’m gonna take my Western overland excursion book and the working with film book that I made as ebooks back in 2012, and 2013. And I’m going to try and take those spreads like I was mentioned, and lay those out in pages and then submit those to the to the through iTunes Connect to the books store. So that I can have those available in the bookstore, like under my name and available for download. So anything that’ll be kind of cool. It’ll be a project that I hope to take just a couple of days. But that’s just sort of the first phase is taking those old books and putting that up as part of the library into my name upon the bookstore. But in addition to that, what I’m trying to do right now is go through, and I’m trying to build a bunch of like photo books, which I think is kind of interesting. I used to try and write a lot for the older ebooks that I had, or at least write like sections, captions, paragraphs and stuff for it. And a lot of that was sort of thing writing. And I may still kind of jump into that. But just as a more simple project. What I want to do is go through my my collection of photographs. And I want to try and pick out a bunch of the images that are all sort of tied together in some sort of collection idea. What I’m working on right now is images of the high desert out from Eastern Oregon. And so I’m trying to go through all those in from different trips I’ve done over the last almost two decades to to Eastern Oregon. And I’m trying to lay those out in a way that sort of shows the way that I’ve grown in photography and the way that time has elapsed out there. You know, it’s like overtime, it’s interest. Like, I think there’s like carvings on a tree that I’ve done back in maybe 2004, or something like that. But then there’s images of that same tree in 2009, and 2012, and then 2015. And then it’s just interesting to kind of see that and how it’s evolved over time and how it’s, it’s different now than what it had once been. So I’m looking forward to trying to jump in there. And then take a bunch of those images that had lay those out. It’s just a photo book. So you can go through and just kind of swipe through and see these, these high quality, I guess renders of these images laid out in an ebook. And that might be a way that I try and show off a bunch of my photographs from here on out, is do sort of minimal writing, I think, you know, it’s until people start asking for more, I think I’m going to kind of cut down on the amount of writing I do. But I’m going to try and focus on doing some some interesting layout stuff. And maybe some interesting context stuff that’s also cool about it is outside of writing and images. With with these ebooks, you can put in audio pieces, or you can put in like 3d animations, or you can put in video clips. So all these things, I think, would be really interesting to try and use and sort of push the limits of the the type of multimedia experience you can create with these ebooks. And I think that’d be kind of a fun way to get into it for a while. But I’m hoping to do this high desert book. First, I’m open to do like a portfolio book soon where it’s just a tighter collection of my best images over over the last, you know, however long period of time, or like do do other sections where it’s sort of by topic like I’m in Hawaii right now. So I want to try and put together a book of some of the images that I’ve taken here in Hawaii over time, or some of the images are taken around Astrophotography and around like space and sort of the context of space stuff. Maybe I can do that I need like this night sky heading that I’ve been working on. So just a couple of different ideas that I’ve been trying to run through. But I’m looking forward to doing that. And I’m probably going to hop off this podcast, edit this audio, throw it up online, and then I’m going to
jump over to WordPress and start trying to do some development stuff for the rest of the evening here on this rainy Hawaii evening here and the end of January 2019. Thanks a lot for listening to all of this podcast. Really appreciate it. You can shoot me a message go to Billy Newman photo calm, head over to the about page and go down to that contact form. shoot me a message if you’re interested. I’ll get those emails and love to hear from you guys, if if anybody actually ever finds his podcasts or tunes into it. Outside of that, you can find me on Instagram on Twitter on Facebook, I’m sure everywhere else too. So thanks a lot for checking it out. Talk to you guys soon. Bye.