This past Wednesday, when trying to get to the dashboard to work on my blog, I was surprised to see the WordPress 5-minute installation page instead. I then tried getting to the blog from my spots in the Commentators lists of fellow Alex Jeffreys students, but to no avail: For the fifth time, I had lost my blog!

Fortunately for me, this time I had a recent blog database backup, thanks to having installed the WP-DB-Backup plugin when first starting blogging. I had chosen to receive the backup file weekly in my mailbox, so I had it handy for the job ahead. Now I just had to find out how to use it…

After doing some research in Google for ‘how to restore a WordPress database’, I concluded that the simplest set of instructions appeared to be in the WordPress Codex itself. Following the steps in the Using phpMyAdmin section of the document, I logged in phpMyAdmin through the Cpanel of my domain. Next, the codex instructs to “…select the database that you will be importing your data into.”

It took me a while to figure out how to identify which database to use since phpMyAdmin listed three different ones under my domain login username. Finally I realized that the backup file name that the plugin generates contains the database name. In my case, the file name was brighter_wrdp2_wp_20091229_243.sql, so I picked ‘wrdp2′ as the database to restore:

And that was the trickiest part of the process! The remaining six steps required three simple clicks of the mouse and in a few seconds I had my blog back.

What a difference from the four previous mishaps… Having that backup file was the key to an easy recovery of my blog, so many thanks to Austin Matzko for a most effective plugin!

For the past few weeks, I have been working on the suggestions in the Website Grader report to improve search engine ranking. In the Off-Page SEO section of the report, besides the all-important inbound links number, there are two seemingly relevant items: being listed in dmoz and in the Yahoo! Directory.

I started with dmoz, as it was referred to as “the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web”, which sounded impressive to me. For some reason I found it hard to define the category for my blog; finally, I chose Business: Marketing and Advertising: Internet Marketing: Marketing Services as the best fit. Unfortunately, dmoz does not acknowledge a submission and they do not offer any alternate method to follow-up on it, hence the only thing to do is wait. But as of today, waiting has not worked and my blog has not been listed. I guess I could try again, as suggested in this interesting article on the subject.

As for the Yahoo! Directory, I shunned from it after I found out there is a substantial fee for their service ($299 is substantial to me). Instead, I opted for submitting my blog URL for free to Yahoo! Search.

Other actions I have taken after the suggestions in the report: I have added the Alexa traffic rank button to my blog (there is nothing to brag about my rank just yet) and submitted one article to Digg; I bookmarked on del.icio.us myself, maybe something I should not have done…  I also added the Twitter Follow Me button to the side. The little blue bird looks good there, I think.

A rather puzzling statement from Website Grader is the one about “Too many images found”. There is not much to do except for ignoring it: the pictures I have are the gravatars of the top commentators and the image for the e-book cover in the opt-in form. They stay!

One thing that has botehred me a bit is that I could not get the Website Grader badge to show my updated grade after all the above actions (it got up to 82). Since I could not establish the root cause, I decided to remove it. Something similar happened with the Alexa rank button, but this one updates automatically now. I might give the badge a second chance…

There is always more that can be done but I think I have addressed the Website Grader report sufficiently. I should now go back to focus on getting links and continue commenting on other blogs.

Gosh! It took me too long to post again…