Today I want to tell you about an absolutely terrific blogging plug-in that allows you to turn your blog or website into a multimedia experience simply by installing it. First, it has been incorrectly called a Wordpress plugin before, but the fact is that it can be installed on blogs that useBlogger, MoveableType, Typepad, as well as Drupal sites, self-hosted Wordpress blogs and many other platforms as well.

Anyway, I’m not just talking about adding photographs, video or Google maps. If you have not heard of Apture, get ready to be just a little bit overwhelmed by the new possibilities for your blog.

What if there was a way, when you write a post about any subject under the sun, for you to transform any word in your post into a link that is a further jumping off point to any one of over 50 authoritative content sources, like NPR, IMBD, Wikipedia, and the New York Times? Apture is a way to add background information to your post without having to research to get the data and find specific links. Maybe this blog post is already giving you the idea. This free blogging plug-in has been invaluable for me on sites that I have that have to do with Bali travel, people, or more technical subjects like web programming as well. It’s not that I’m too lazy to dig up facts to corroborate my point (well okay, maybe I am pretty lazy), but why duplicate effort if the New York Times has an excellent article on a museum or IMBD has extra facts about a movie I have reviewed? Apture gives you away to fill out the information or opinion that you are putting forth, extra information to complement what you’re writing about, so that subjects that are peripheral to your point but maybe still interesting to your readers can be easily covered.

One feature that I have to mention is how Apture lets you clip only the portion of a YouTube video that is relevant to your post, or that you care to show… very cool.

The only downside with Apture might be that you are tempted to overuse it. I suppose it’s possible that the substance of your post could be diluted by all the extra information you are linking to. But used sparingly, I think it really has to enhance your readers’ experience. I urge you to try the Apture plug-in: what a great blogging add-on it is.

If you are a new blogger, or even if you’ve been blogging for a long time(!) it’s important to understand that just because you save and publish a post it doesn’t mean that it is reliably saved forever on your host. From time to time hosting companies have problems, and sometimes it happens that files are corrupted or lost irretrievably. It’s also possible that in tinkering with code you can make changes that you don’t intend to make, even if you’re quite sure that you know what you’re doing. Another source of problems for bloggers in the area of losing data or even entire websites is that the addition of add-ons or templates to your blogging software installation can sometimes result in myriad unintended problems. This happens especially when a template or add-on hasn’t been adequately tested against the latest version of the blogging software. It’s at times like this when you will wish there was something you could do about your loss. It happened to me once. But it won’t happen again!

The way to avoid problems of this sort is to proactively back up your files before you have a problem. You can manually create a zipped copy of your entire website and store it on your hard drive or some other media, or e-mail it to yourself. The problem is that if you’re an active blogger, to manually create backup files on a regular basis will become very time consuming, in addition to requiring a little bit of technical know-how.

Luckily, most blogging software packages have an add-on/plug-in that automates the process of backing up your site so that problems, regardless of whose fault they are, can be handled by reconstructing your entire blog from the backup if necessary. Wordpress in particular has many options when it comes to automatically backing up your blog files. One that I can recommend personally is the WordPress database backup plug-in by Austin Matzko. It is very easy to use, and lets you immediately back up your WordPress blog and e-mail the resulting file to an address you specify. You can also very easily select to have backups performed automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and again, have the backups sent to you.

Don’t wait until you really, really need it to become convinced of the value of having a reliable, automatic blogging tool that lets you backup your files. Pick one and install it today.