WordPress 2.8 + allows you to automatically run updates from the WordPress admin. As long as you know your FTP username and Password you can run it automatically and it takes care of all the extra steps which save you time and unfortunate mistakes.
Here Matt Cutts explains the in’s and out’s of WordPress and blogging best practices. He tells you about WordPress Security as well as WordPress SEO techniques and best practices. There is advice on how to blog and how not to blog etc. Matt Cutts is a software engineer and head of Google’s Webspam team.
There is a now a great FTP program that is available for free. The program is FileZilla and it can be downloaded here: http://filezilla-project.org/
The most accepted way to make sure all of your traffic goes to the appropriate URL is to use a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.
You can get rid of the duplicate products and categories in Google by adding a ‘canonical URL’ link in your Miva Merchant head tags.