Simple yet effective this one: Subscribe to your own blog’s feed including the comments.
Why? Well apart from boosting your feed count by one, it’s also a very good form of emergency backup for your blog. Of course, you all back up your blogs daily don’t you? (If not, have a read of my post Backup Your Blog) Depending on how often you post, you should back up daily or at least weekly, and if you use V2 of the Wordpress backup plugin and WordPress 2.1 you can set it to email you with your backup automatically. I have it sent to my Gmail account, so I’m protected against my server going down AND my own PC. If Google go down, we’re all doomed anyway…
But, even if you’re very good about backing up, if your server crashes 23 hours and 59 minutes after the last backup, those comments and of course posts, are lost forever. Which is where your feed comes in.
Get a free account at Google Reader if you haven’t already, and add your main feed and your comment feed. Google reads and records all of these independently of your blog, so even if your webhost goes up in flames, the text of the post and comments remains in Google Reader.
How much can you save? Looking at my feed in Google Reader, it has posts saved back to Dec 31st 2006 and comments back to February 7th, nearly 400 of them. All I would have to do is cut & paste the text into new posts and comments to replace any lost.
Best of it is, you don’t need to do anything once you’ve added your feed to Google Reader, but it’s always there if you need it. This tip is especially useful for Blogger users who have no other means of backing up.
Of course, now you have an account at Google Reader, why not add my feed while you’re there? 
19 users commented in " Subscribe To Your Own Blog "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackHehe, Google Reader saved my blog’s posts when the host had a database problem and restored the backups from 24 hours prior. It also saved eJabs.com when his host’s server crashed.
Oh, I already have you in my reader, Chris. I can’t seem to make it to every website I want to everyday and it’s the next best thing. I really like how the pictures from your Autofocus blog come through as well.
Well, I do a manual backup every 3-4 days, so I guess your tips is indeed a good suggestion should anything unexpected happens.
Great suggestion – I never would have thought of it!
I added myself, and Blog-op too
You are right man ,this is a good way of getting a backup .
Cheers RT, I know what you mean, you could spend a whole day visiting other people, and not writing anything on your own blog! Glad the pictures are coming through, it’s a real plus for Google Reader as it means they are backed up a well.
Thanks for the comments guys, it’s actually been proven today, as a friend of mine has deleted her blog – fortunately I was able to get all of the posts back to the beginning of February, including pictures, transferred in to a Word file for her. Hope she can restore them OK!
Added myself now and you!
Oh is php something i need to know about?
Cheers Claire.
PHP is only something you’d need to know if you start up your own WordPress blog, and even then it’s not essential. It’s really like messing around with the code of your Blogger blog TBH – add a snippet of code here, alter a little bit there.
‘course you could take it a lot further and design your own themes etc. but no, knowledge of it is not essential.
Im subscribed to our own feed as well as this and thermal blog.
I also get BAYB feed through email lol
why i never think of this before.
Now, you made me realize how important it is.
Thanks Matthew
Simple but effective Zaki.
Wow, you just convinced me to switch to Google Reader! -Anita
It really is useful Anita.
It’s very easy to cut and paste the text from Google Reader into a Word document for example – so Blogger users could do this once a month and have a backup of their entire blog & comments safely stored.
Email it to their own Gmail account and it’s a double backup.
[...] Subscribe to your own blog by Blog Op [...]
Very informative post buddy
and a very innovative method to backup the blog content
Been there before
http://blog-op.com/wordpress-users-v2-backup-plugin-available/
I think you’re where I first became aware of this Baxter, it was only recent events that prompted me to see how far back Google was recording my blogs – I was amazed to see it go back into 2006!
[...] and It’s like a backup just in case something might go wrong here. Got this idea from Subscribe to Your own Blog [Found Via Madhur Kapoor’s [...]
Thanks for the advice about backing up. I am on dial up so backing up takes forever.
Ouch, I can imagine. As an example, Google Reader will take around 3 months posts & comments, which can be saved into a Word Document, all without downloading a thing.
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