Viewing Archives in Web Development

In this post, I will follow up on some of the comments and requests that generated around my newly popular post, How to Create Your Very Own “Archive Navigator”. I’ll cover graceful degradation (for non-javascript), and how to achieve tabs like I did.

Developing a Facebook application is a great starting point in learning to develop database driven web applications. Prior to developing the Wii Friend Number app, I was mostly a front end developer. After releasing it, I felt I was a more well-rounded developer now that I understood the basics of back end development.

Last week I received an email from fellow reader Jaap asking if I could provide a link to a plugin that would implement something like my very cool Archive Navigator you see to the right. I’ve provided a link to a plugin which looks to achieve a similar effect and wrote a mini-tutorial for those who want to take a stab at developing it themselves.

In part one of this tutorial, Automating Your Server Backups On Media Temple’s Grid-Server, I explained how to automate backups of your files on your grid-server. Unfortunately, not all your data was covered in those backups because it did not include your database. Now I will describe how you can utilize cron and mysqldump to automate database backups on the grid-server side.

Since running this blog on Media Temple’s grid-server, I was spoiled by the minimal effort required to backup my web stuff online thanks to the Data Backup utility available through the grid-server admin panel. Unfortunately, this utility was pulled over a month ago and I always want a backup to revert to in case an upgrade of WordPress or some other installation goes wrong. In this post I outline how to automate backups using rsync and cron.

I’ve gotten a couple of emails from some readers asking how I went about displaying some of my latest flickr photos on my sidebar. So for any Wordpress bloggers out there looking to customize your current Wordpress theme to include your flickr thumbnails, read on!