Recently, while dealing with the dreaded white screen of death, I found myself unable to login to the WordPress Admin area to manually disable all of the plugins used here at Perishable Press. In the past, I have dealt with this situation by simply deleting all plugin files from the server, however this time, time was of the essence — I had only a few minutes with which to troubleshoot, diagnose, and ultimately resolve the deadly white-screen syndrome. Fortunately, after a few minutes of digging through the WordPress Codex, I had discovered enough information to successfully complete my mission. Now that the fiasco is over, I want to share a simple technique for quickly disabling and (re-)enabling your entire set of WordPress plugins.

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Over the past several years working online, my year-end maintenance routine has evolved from simple website backups to a robust strategy involving many important and useful tasks. Some of the items on the list have indeed been performed multiple times throughout the year, but are included here to emphasize their importance. Additionally, many of these tasks are great for helping bloggers gain a clearer picture of their overall online empire, while attaining a sense of annual “closure” concerning the work of the previous year. So, let’s dig into my personal year-end strategy for cleaning things up and preparing for the new year..

Make complete backups of your work

Frequent backups should be a part of any serious online strategy. At the end of the year, I create a complete backup of everything, including all site files (XHTML, PHP, images, JavaScript, htaccess, etc.), as well as all associated database content. I generally duplicate my entire set of files (for all domains), and then include duplicate database backups in their respective directories. I also take this opportunity to purge my email inbox of any “loose ends” by relocating them to their respective domain’s backup directory. I also do this for any loose files, configuration files, article backups, and anything else that goes with a particular domain. This works great at consolidating and organizing data that may be needed at some point in the future. After I have consolidated everything worth keeping, I delete all other backups for the year and burn a permanent copy for the archives. Thus, as time goes on, I will have accumulated all the best bits of each year into a nice annual library of backup content. I can live with that :)

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