So for the past few weeks my mind has pretty much been in ‘blog’ mode, which you can probably tell due to my recent fixation on blog related posts. I’ve done nothing but think about my new blog and over the previous weekend I got the barebones live on the net.

However, it didn’t all go to plan. There was something wrong with the host which left my site back in 1982 until the MUO authors, more specifically Karl, was able to get her up and running while I yelled at my hosting company.

So I was happy. For a while. But then the thought of ‘what if the host was to go belly up right now?’ popped into my mind. At any minute it could all just go wrong and I’d be left blogless. All my posts would be gone. The theme I’ve fine-tuned. The media I’ve uploaded. It would be the virtual equivalent of pulling the pin from the hand grenade and tossing it into the epicentre of my site. The only remnants of its existence being a ‘404′ error. And you want to know the worst thing? No matter how many times your press ‘F5′, the blog simply wont appear. Ever.

There are two things you need to do to have a full backup of your website. The first one is easy, you just have to backups server files. This can be easily done using any FTP client. Just connect to your server and copy the contents of the folder to your computer.

Second, you need to backup your database. Figuring out how to backup your Wordpress blog database is the way to go. Most definitely.

One could do this the hard way. You could manually backup everything using an FTP client and an external hard drive. But that’s the hard way. So here is an easy way to backup your Wordpress blog – in three easy steps no less.

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I don’t want this article to sound like a PR piece for the Mexican grill restaurant, Chipotle, but writing as regular customer of the eatery, I want to share how well designed the company’s iPhone and iPod touch app (App Store link) is and why it should be a model for other eateries looking to develop and offer similar iPhone apps for free.

Most iPhone users relish being able to use our iPhone to get things done. We’re always wondering if there is indeed “an app for that” – iPhone apps for free, from mapping directions, getting movie previews, to iPhone food ordering apps.

I’ve tried ordering food using the traditional website structure of a few restaurants, but the iPhone web-formatted user interface for ordering food on those sites took more time than it was worth. The Chipotle iPhone food ordering app is the first of its kind that I’ve seen that makes ordering food very simple.

You can tell the app developers put a lot of thought in how to make the user interface relatively easy to use and aesthetically appealing. The application is built in a hierarchical manner, whereby a limited list of menu items in which you click to further drill down into additional menu items for more levels of details.

To order food using the app, you of course have to set up an account that includes your credit card. Based on the feedback the application has received, it is better to create your account online rather than through the application.

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If you’ve never tried webcam live online video conferencing, taking snapshots or otherwise playing with your webcam over the Internet, you’re missing out on another whole dimension of the web. Instant messaging, tweeting and blogging are lots of fun, but when you integrate video into one or more of these activities, they are transformed into much more personal and interactive experiences.

While you might already be familiar with the many apps that are available for your personal webcam that you use at home, there are also many very cool applications that are especially valuable if you travel a lot with a portable USB webcam, or if you use many different computers that have their own built-in webcams. These days, most laptops or desktops have them.

I’ve shared my own obsession with webcam software here at MakeUseOf with my own articles, such as adding VZOChat to your blog to interact with your visitors. I’m not the only one! Simon also wrote about how to use your webcam to control games, and Mark mentioned a couple of useful motion sensor webcam applications as well. To add to the MakeUseOf library of useful webcam resources, I’d like to turn now to three free applications that let you use your webcam live and online to take and share photos, broadcast or “tweet” video updates, and even speed date however, whenever and wherever you like.

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Not using the cloud is almost impossible these days. You can use the cloud for emails, document publishing and of course storing, backing up and sharing files as well.

We have reviewed quite a few online storage services in the past. Microsoft’s offering Skydrive is right up there with others when it comes to storage space, offering a staggering 25 GB of online space. In addition we also showed you how you can edit your Office documents stored in Windows Live Skydrive with Office Webapps.

One of the most annoying aspects of nearly all online storage solutions is that you have to use a web browser to upload and manage files. Some of them offer Java applets to upload but there are a number of other operations that you may want to perform on the files you have in your account. Doing them in a web browser is generally not the best way to do such things. It would be nicer if you could integrate Skydrive into the Windows shell. Wouldn’t it?

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When we were discussing about Afloat, we talked about how modern people love to open so many applications at once. Too many open windows will clutter the desktop and make our work flow less comfortable. The solution that Afloat provides for organizing your desktop is making the most used window transparent and keeping it above all other windows.

There are of course other ways to organize desktop clutter, such as buying a bigger screen, opening less windows, or grouping the windows into several virtual spaces. I accidentally found a rather old application – but working just fine under Snow Leopard – which takes a completely different approach to the problem: making the windows disappear.

To show or not to show

Whether it’s only to hide your games when your boss is around, or to instantly switch your cluttered desktop into a clean working environment (where only the chosen windows are visible), Show Desktop is your solution.

As the name suggests, this small application will hide all the opened windows and show the desktop. Maybe similar to Expose, but more powerful. And all it takes is just a click.

When you run this application for the first time, Show Desktop will appear in the “Icon mode“. You can activate its function through the app icon in the dock.

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So you got some free time on your hands do ya?  Looking to laugh so hard you will spit milk through your nose – even if you are not drinking milk? Maybe you want to see someone make a fool of themselves or even go nuts and hurt some people.

It’s hard to tell what people will enjoy or be revolted by. For instance I enjoy gruesome videos, my wife on the other hand like cuddly snuggly bunnies. So choose your videos wisely.

Here are 5 Internet video sites that I frequent to find videos that will entertain me! Let’s check each of them out.

VeryFunnyAds

The first one is called VeryFunnyAds. As you can imagine this website has only very funny ads, as in advertisements. It is a collection of awesomely funny commercials that have either aired on television or were mockups of what should have been aired! I worked for a company called Adforum way back when (10 years ago) and they catalogued advertisements as well -  but long story short – VeryFunnyAds has very funny ads!

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) The App Garden – Newly created section on Flickr which basically is a repository of Flickr apps. It lists all sorts of handy tools for Flickr i.e. stats counters, download/upload tools, slideshow generators, mobile browsers and so on. You can search for apps, browse by tags, and discover new tools. Read more: The App Garden – Great Flickr Tools Collection

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There are times when we want to check certain illness symptoms we or our loved ones are experiencing. We may not be sure if the symptoms warrant further investigation or we might just want to satisfy our curiosity about health and fitness in general.

In this article, let us look at two online guides to check your illness symptoms online, which are extremely easy to use and provide information about probable causes.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to stress that these guides should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. It is better that you use these tools as a supplementary resource to get more information, while you may be waiting for your doctor’s appointment, or to learn more about certain illnesses.

Check Symptoms Online With WebMD Symptom Checker

Web MD Symptom Checker is an easy to use interactive tool, where you select specific symptoms and it identifies possible causes.

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Call Transmute a bookmark ‘synchronization’ tool. Transmute calls itself the ultimate bookmarks converter. Both claims need to hold true for filling in a job that’s a result of prolific web browsing and using more than one browser to do it.

It’s safe to assume that you have more than one browser installed on your system. I have five. Though we may not use more than two, all of us suffer from a bit of browser fancy. As soon as developers announce a launch of a browser that promises to speed up the web for us, we click on the download link. That’s not a problem, but keeping the same set of bookmarks across the browsers is.

Xmarks is a nifty solution to migrate bookmarks across the world. But for now, it supports Firefox and IE (with Safari in Mac OS). The one for Google Chrome is in the works. The browser that’s missing is Opera. That leaves us with a job half done. Bookmark syncing using Delicious and its bookmarklet tool is one roundabout. But it’s public by default and you have to log-in to change it to private. So, it’s still not as easy a click.

Transmute attempts to fill the gap by letting us migrate bookmarks across all the browsers.

Why Is it Such a Headache to Migrate Bookmarks?

Not very much so, but every browser has its own way of storing its bookmarks. Most bookmarks are stored as HTML files. Opera uses an .adr format. Firefox 3.5+ too differs in that respect as it stores its bookmarks in a Places.sqlite file which is a database file. The bookmarks.html files that used to hold all the links in the earlier versions had been discontinued from Firefox 3 onwards.

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Gaming can be an expensive hobby, especially the hardware. If you want to keep up, you’ll have to make sure you’ve got a sufficiently strong PC.

By building your own system, you will be able to suppress these costs, saving up to a couple hundred bucks.

But what you’re planning to do isn’t easy, and we’re not talking about the actual building. First you’ll need to gather all of your components.

MakeUseOf presents its latest PDF release - How to Build a Gaming PC, written by our very own PDF Manual Editor, Simon Slangen. In this guide, we’ll familiarize you with all the different computer components, from a gamer’s point of view. Instead of telling you what to buy, we’ll teach you how to weigh and judge these individual components.

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