Open Source Activism

The above error is appears to be a common occurrence when you upgrade your Mediawiki installation from version 1.11 to 1.12. To fix this you need to have your system administrator do the following:

yum -y install php-xml
service httpd restart

The installs the XML modules into PHP. Restarting httpd allows the web server, in this case Apache, to load the new modules.

This solution came from the Mediawiki Support Desk.

Website backups go hand in had with security. They are security for a disaster or if you website gets hacked. You should make regular backups of your website. This applies not only to websites, but blogs, Joomla and Mediawiki sites.

Most hosting companies do not do backups for you. They backup the server installation, but leave you on your own for your blog. The better hosting companies will do periodic backups of your websites. If anyone know hosting companies that do or don’t provide backups please add them in the comments. I am talking about the basic hosting services that many bloggers and simple websites use. Siteground does weekly backups, while Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Cyberwurx do not.

To do a backup, you usually have 2 options with most hosting company control panels. These 2 methods are as follows:

1. Full backup of your entire site
   • Includes your website, database and home directory files
   • Options:
     1. Save this to your local computer
     2. Backup locally on the hosting server and then download when complete
2. Separate backups for your database and your website
   • Run this after you add plugins, themes, images, podcasts, videos or other files on your website
   • Backup your database on a more regular basis

My recommendations for backups would be to do a full backup after you have your website completely setup and then again once a quarter. I would then recommend doing a website only backup monthly unless you make many changes to your website on a regular basis. This does not count frequent posting updates. I would then do the website backup at least weekly or whenever a large number of changes are made. Lastly, I would recommend backup up the database at least weekly. If you post multiple times a day you may want to make backups daily or find a service that does it for you.

To make these backups faster, more reliable, and quickly accessible, allow the backups to run locally on the hosting server. When it is complete, download them to you local computer.

I’ve finally decided to start a technology blog. I have had friends encourage me to do this for a while. My intent will be to blog about what I do to setup open source technology in my work to help with political activism. I will blog mostly about the following open source packages and topics:

• Wordpress - blogging software utilized by Blogivists
• Joomla - CMS system that contains blogs, forums, polls and other features
• Mediawiki - Software used by Wikipedia
• Web server setup/management
• Internet Identity