a.k.a. Shawn Honnick specializing in wonderful since 1968
*also Chipotle pictures, NYC adventures, and little known safety tactics like fake hand washing.
**If you're a disgruntled employee, do something about it (no, it's not a pyramid... THIS is the PYRAMID) or just sit around and grumble like everyone over at the disgruntled employee forums.
Posts tagged: wordpress
working my fingers to the bone
When did upgrading Wordpress become so easy?
Wordpress new hotness.
New Wordpress dashboard is pretty snazzy!
* I’m a little out of date on installing and maintainging Wordpress thanks to Tumblr :-)
That doesn’t sound like much, but it is. It will grow. Watch.
What is the process for moving my WordPress blog to another host?
As the technology manager at b5media, my team is often asked to migrate a blog to our cluster. Usually, when that happens, I ask a bunch of relevant questions:
- Is the blog a WordPress blog? If not, what platform is it?
- Are we going to continue to use the same domain or do we want to use a new or existing one?
- Are we merging this blog with an existing blog?
- Is it important to preserve permalinks?
- If this is a WordPress blog, what version of WordPress is being used?
- How many authors?
Lots of relevant information is needed to migrate a blog. This question is about moving a WordPress blog so we’ll assume that it’s not a Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger or Expression engine blog. Or any other platform for that matter. WordPress.com counts as a “WordPress” blog though. ;-)
Solution 1: Quick Move
The easiest way to move from one blog to another, particularly if you’re moving the blog to a new domain and both already resolve (talk to your registrar or host to get help with DNS resolution) then you can move your categories, posts and comments using WordPress’ export functionality. This is native in WP 2.1, however, you can achieve nearly the same thing with my WordPress-to-WordPress importer. Having the WXR file, as it is called, in hand you can import into WordPress 2.1 at the new location.
The sacrifice you give up in preservation of options. You’ll have to go in and set your permalink structure, your blog name, description, number of posts to display and any other options. You will have to upload and activate plugins, etc. This is a content migration solution only.
Incidentally, this is the only way to move off of WordPress.com and the only way to merge a blog into another one - say if you were retiring it.
Solution 2: Full Move
If the quick way doesn’t provide satisfactory results, you can do the full way. I always recommend doing whatever you can by SSH, but some hosts won’t allow for that and some folks are simply scared stupid of command line. Is text really that scary? :)
1. First of all, back up your database. You can do this via phpMyAdmin. I would not recommend the formerly-bundled wp-db-backup plugin for a number of reasons that ultimately end in the reason why it is no longer a bundled plugin. If you’re using SSH, you’ll want to use the mysqldump command:
mysqldump -uUSER -p DBNAME > dump.sql
2. Now, grab your files. Most people choose FTP for this, but again, if you can use SSH to create an archive file of your data, do it for reliability reasons. Make sure you grab your .htaccess and database dump as well.
tar cvf archive.tar path/to/blog/dir path/to/dump.sql
The compress it:
gzip archive.tar
This will create a file called archive.tar.gz that you can grab via SFTP or FTP and transfer to your new server.
3. On the new server, you have to restore everything back in to place. First, make sure you have a database setup for your blog on your new server. If you just used FTP to grab all your stuff, ignore the next bit. If you tarred your archive and database dump, I’d recommend untarring in a temporary location.
tar zxvf archive.tar.gz
Now, whether you used FTP or SSH, you can move your data files into the proper location and run a:
mysql -uUSER -p NEWDBNAME < dump.sql
With any luck, once your DNS is pointed at the new server and begins to resolve, your blog will be perfectly moved.
My bloated, directionless Wordpress blog, shawnblog.com, was either hacked or corrupted in some other way and I failed to restore the content. I really never chose a topic and was spending far too much time and, as much as I’d like to think I should be, I’m not on the A, B or C list of bloggers.
It seems that, with the “social web” and “web 2.0” direction things seem to be moving in, the passionate argument I used to make (that web based, hosted solutions are better for the mainstream and therefore, will be more likely to grow and become wildly popular) when I worked for TA may have been correct (of course).
Look at all the browser based, hosted “apps” out there! Who needs to install something and administer scripts when you can just use the latest and greatest newly developed services at will?
I might always maintain a more static page somewhere but it will not be something I have to upgrade and tweak all the time. Not hating (at all), just seeing that the blog idea might be old (finally) or evolving as anything that grows must do.
This looks like a great service. For now Soon, shawnblog.com is “running” Serendipity will be fed by tumblr and it’s going to get about 75% 78% less of my time.
