Google just announced support for PubSubHubbub (PuSH) in Google Reader. With PubSubHubbub, new posts show up nearly instantly in Google Reader instead of up to a half hour delay. This means content gets pushed to your readers faster.

However, this will only work for sites that have PubSubHubbub enabled. Fortunately, this is very easy on WordPress:

• Install the PubSubHubbub plugin – you can do this by going to Plugins -> Add New and searching for PubSubHubbub. Two plugins exist, the one called “PubSubHubbub” seems to be the more popular and actively maintained plugin, so go with that one.
• Once its installed, activate it:
  
• Thats it. Your posts should now show up in Google Reader nearly instantly.

TechCrunch created their own “Buzz it” button and posted a link to the code in the comments. Its easy to add to any wordpress site (or really any other content management system. The following steps will show you how to add a “Buzz This” link to your site, like the one above on the BlinkTag Blog.

• Open the single.php file of your sites template. You can do this via FTP or in WordPress by going to “Appearance” -> “Editor” and selecting single.php.
• Paste the following code where you would like the Buzz It button to appear. If you are not sure where, the line right before or after <?php the_content(); ?> is a good place.

<a href="javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20GR________bookmarklet_domain=&quot;http://www.google.com&quot;;if(b&amp;&amp;!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(&quot;script&quot;));void(z.src=&quot;http://www.google.com/reader/ui/link-bookmarklet.js&quot;);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}">
<img src="http://IMAGE HERE" border="0" alt="Share on Google Buzz" /> Share on Google Buzz</a>

• Replace http://IMAGE HERE with the URL of your image, or remove the image code entirely to have a text only link. If you want, take this 16×16 Buzz Logo image: but please copy it to your site, don’t link directly the image hosted on BlinkTag.
• Save the single.php file. Test it out on an individual posts page on your site.
• This same process can be in used in page.php or any other template file to add a Buzz link to your WordPress pages.

Respond in the comments if you come up with a better way to accomplish this. If you liked this post, please Buzz it!

At BlinkTag, we’ve used various versions of this script to help most of our clients make nightly backups. In several instances, this has proven to be invaluable when content gets lost or overwritten. The script, while somewhat inefficient, keeps a full backup from every day so its possible to revert the site back to any previous days status.

The script could work for backing up any site, not necessarily just wordpress based sites. It can grab any database you’d like an bundle it with the backup.

View the wordpress backup script
Let us know in the comments below if you have questions/comments or creative uses for this script.

You’ll need access to run SQL statements on your database. For most people, using phpmyadmin is the easiest way to accomplish this. phpmyadmin is usually available on the control panel backend that your webhost provides.

Before you do anything, its a good idea to backup your entire database. If you are using phpmyadmin, you can do this by selecting your wordpress database and going to “export”. Select “Save as File” and “zipped” or “gzipped”.

Once you are ready to do the find replace, you can enter your SQL statements in the “SQL” tab of phpmyadmin. Here is the syntax for a find replace in mySQL:

update TABLE_NAME set FIELD_NAME = replace(FIELD_NAME, 'find this string', 'replace found string with this string');

In wordpress, to search the content of all posts and pages, you would use the table wp_posts and the field post_content:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, 'find this string', 'replace found string with this string');

Its important to note that a forwardslash (/) is an invalid character, so you can use a backslash (\) to escape each forward slash. Its best to use a full URL when find/replacing on the post content as if you just use the slug you might end up changing more than you intended and this is searching the actual text of every post as well as the URLs contained inside of link and image tags.

For example, to change URLs from http://www.oldsite.com/blog to http://newsite.com would use:

update wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content, 'http:\/\/www.oldsite.com\/blog', 'http:\/\newsite.com');