I found time for two long-delayed activities today. The first: A haircut, which I had been postponing for weeks. The second: Updating Adobe Acrobat to version 7.0.8 - a move months late. Neither might seem very important from the outset, but they help more than you might expect in my daily routine.
If simple maintainance works for personal hygiene and publishing software, why shouldn’t it work for blogs? Well, there really is no reason, so here’s 5 simple (okay, maybe not always simple) steps you might have postponed for weeks, months, quarters, or even… a year or two:
- Backup, backup, backup. Yes, everything!
I’m a strong advocate of backups. In fact, I’d expect all of you WordPress bloggers to already have setup database backups to be e-mailed to your inbox daily by now, so we move on to file backups - an oft-ignored necessity. Here we’re talking about your entire WP directory - which some control panels provide automatic backups of (e.g. cPanel). You don’t have to do this every day, but once every few months would be good.
- Resolve 404s (and other HTTP/URL errors)
A year ago, you might have been excused for leaving 404s (not found errors) lying around your blog. With the advent of Google Sitemaps (now rebranded as part of Google Webmaster Tools), however, tracking URL-related errors has become a breeze.
Yep, it’s also free.
- Submit a SitemapLet’s say you find your blog only superficially indexed by dear Google during a regular maintainance session (maybe the one you’ll do right after this post :)). One of the easiest first steps to take? Use Google Sitemaps. This will help the overworked Googlebot understand your blog. For WordPress users, check out this uber plugin. Not only will it automatically generate your sitemap for you, you can even assign weights to various parts of your blog.
- Update Best/Most Popular Posts Section
The benefit of putting up a Best Posts or Most Popular Posts section comes from the fact that humans make the selections (whether you or your readers). The downside of this is that it’ll often require upkeep. Popular posts change with the crowd and you’ll write posts that deserve to enter the Best Posts section every now and then (hopefully). Truthfully, I haven’t updated my Best of View for quite a while now either (which I’ll get to right after this post… I hope).
- Empty Spam “Archive” or Dig for False Positives
If you’ve not set your anti-spam plugin to purge spam every XX days, you just might have to do this step. Even then, you might still want to give this step some consideration. Some false positives are likely to creep into your spam archive once in a while, and if you’re like me, you’ll end up checking for them only every week or so (perhaps even less). You don’t want precious comments in the waste bin, do you?
So, that’s five - most on the more technical side of blogging. In the next part, we’ll look at five more - most less technical, but no less important.
P.S.: Many of the steps above you can complete in minutes (all except No. 4 really). No excuses. Period. And since I’ve started with only five steps, I’m pretty sure they can be completed by the time the next five come out. 
