Restoration
Finally restored the blog in 2.5 hrs, after a stupid mistake following a botched WordPress install.
Lesson learnt: even if tools like WordPress Automatic Upgrade helps you to perform backups, make sure you know everything is backed up before you do a delete!
Even though all the posts have been restored, I think I will not restore any more of the lost images, so there.
Monitoring WordPress using syslog and OSSEC
This has got to be one of the unconventional (yet interesting) ideas I've come across.
It involves the use of a plugin (currently maintained at OSSEC) to get WordPress to send syslog events for OSSEC to parse. It is a good idea since it is good to monitor any web applications running for anomalies, but WordPress doesn't seem to provide any kind of audit logging.
Looking at its capabilities, the first use for this that comes to mind is to monitor sites that run WordPress with multiple user logons. As for those with insufficient access to your web server (you're on a shared webhost), you're probably better off using the tips given at wpbeginner.
I won't know yet, but perhaps I'll have a better idea on what it is good for after I try it out.
Do YOU use OSSEC to monitor your WordPress installations? Any comments on it?
Getting WordPress to work with memcached
WordPress can work with memcached as a cache, and there are plenty of places to find instructions on how to do that.
I referred to Ryan's and Mohanjith's blog posts that detail this, and after some tweaks to get it up working with the most recent version of WordPress on PHP5, I've decided to write some instructions that are a little more recent 