The Maintenance Mode WordPress plugin is a great tool for a blogger who wants to make changes to their website, without those changes being unveiled to visitors. When Maintenance Mode is activated, the blogger continues to see their website in its fully functioning form. Unregistered/users who aren’t logged in, on the other hand, see a page that is something like the “under construction” pages and animated graphics from the early ’00s.

This is what a blog under Maintenance Mode will look like to unregistered users and registered users who aren’t logged in:

WP-Ban is an easy to use WordPress plugin that allows you to easily ban IP address, hosts and even specific referring domains or individual pages from your blog. It works the same way as manually editing your .htaccess file, except that it does the editing for you. It used to be that if you wanted to ban a pesky spammer or annoying drama stirrer from your website, you would have to FTP to your public files, download a copy of the (usually hidden) .htaccess file, add the blocked IP addresses to it, and then re-upload it. Or, login to your hosting account’s cPanel or hosting account management page and ban IP addresses from there.

WP-Ban integrates the banning process right into WordPress, and as mentioned above, adds a few extras. You can ban IP address, or entire ranges of IP addresses. Ban a specific host, or ban a specific referring website. You can also exclude an IP address from being banned — useful if you’re worried you might accidentally ban yourself and have a heck of a time getting back into your website later.

WP-Ban also generates a 403 error page for you, which you can completely customize from the administration page.

Once upon a time a server my blog was on hiccuped, and I lost everything. Everything amounted to five months worth of blog entries. Not much by any means, but those were five months of my life documented in writing, gone forever. My host had no backups, which infuriated me. But I was also angry at myself for not taking responsibility for something that meant a lot to me.

I learned my lesson, and immediately wrote myself a post-it note, reminding myself to download a copy of my website once a week.

If you’re using WordPress, you won’t have to leave yourself post-it notes and go through the hassle of making backups. It can do it for you, with a handy plugin called WordPress Database Backup. This plugin requires a simple file upload and activation, and then you’re set to browse to its administration panel. From there, you can specify that a backup be made of all of your posts, comments, categories and links, and any other optional tables (usually containing information generated by other WordPress plugins), and uploaded to the server or emailed to you, on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. You can also download backups on the fly.

This is one of my most favorite WordPress plugins, because it saves my ass in the event that my blog goes down and my host doesn’t have backups.