If you are a regular reader of Extreme Trix, then you may remember that couple of days back our site was deleted while upgrading and it took me almost two days to again make it up. My site was deleted because of my carelessness only. Satish bro told me on first day only to always keep a backup of site so that you can re-store it if anything happens to site by mistake, but didn’t take that seriously and forgot to keep a backup. When I was upgrading my site to WordPress 2.8.6 from WordPress 2.8.1 accidentally my blog directory got deleted (where Extreme Trix is installed) and everything was gone. That time I felt really bad, but thanks to Google Cache which saved my work and time. Somehow I was able to restore my site because of Google Cache (Thank you again Google! ). I don’t want any of my reader to face some problem so today I thought to write about a plug-in for WordPress called – WP-DB-Backup which can be used to take a backup of Database.

Backup

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. The best thing about this plug-in is you don’t need to take backup of your site regularly, just schedule a daily backup from setting page of the plug-in and it will be automatically emailed you or will be saved on your server.

Installation of the plug-in is very simple, just like a normal plug-in upload it to wp-content folder of your WordPress and activate it from Manage Plugins page of your blog. You may need to make /wp-content writable (at least temporarily) for it to create a backup directory. For example: $ cd /wordpress/ $ chgrp www-data wp-content (where “www-data” is the group your FTP client uses) $ chmod g+w wp-content.

If you have yet not installed this plug-in on your blog I will suggest you that to install it immediately. If you are already using this plug-in on your blog to take a backup, then if you don’t mind please share few words about it via comment.

Download / Info

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WP-DB-Backup: A must have WordPress plug-in. is a post from: Extreme Trix

Spam is the worst thing that every blogger is worried about. Although there are many spam control plug-ins which help us in controlling spam none of them is 100% reliable here are the best available anti spam plug-ins which I have used and reviewed.

Akismet – This plug-in is developed by Auttomattic Company and it comes inbuilt with WordPress installation. It checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.

WP-Ban – Most of the Spammers are bots which will comment from a particular IP and WP-Ban is very useful plug-in to avoid comments from particular IP’s and can be used to ban comments based on IP addresses.

WP-Spam Free – Once installed this plug-in will automatically delete comments and thing which I didn’t like in this plug-in is we can’t see the deleted comments.

reCaptcha – I personally hate captcha and at the same time I know that even my readers will hate that, but I hate Spam even more. reCAPTCHA is one of the best captcha plug-in. No doubt this is a great captcha plug-in, but I recommend this plug-in only for those blogs which will get lots of spam comments, as users will lose interest in commenting at your blog if you use captcha at your blog. So use this at your own risk.

Also read – Top 10 WordPress Plug-ins to make your site more user friendly!

Let us know if you know any other anti-spam plug-in that performs better.

[Editor’s Note: This is second guest post by Rajesh Kanuri who regularly blogs at TechCats about WordPress, Social Media, Technology, Tips & Tricks. If u like this post Follow him at twitter (@rajkanuri)]

Best spam control plugins for WordPress blogs. is a post from: Extreme Trix