Simeon Pilgrim

And so we get to the end of the year.  It has been quite a good year personally,

Blog-wise: 92 posts, 133 comments, 18K visits from 141 countries.

Top five viewed pages in 2008:

1. wpf making a expander look like a groupbox
2. remote connection to oracle 10g express via odbc
3. blog
4. category: curse of the azure bonds
5. curse of the azure bonds code wheel copy protection

All of which were 2007 posts, so here are the top five viewed pages from 2008:

1. casio ctk-800 and macbook
2. slow dns on macbook
3. how to build a wireshark plug-in
4. reverse-and-add 110502 in erlang
5. oracles lag in ms sql server 2005

Only a few minutes left of today, this month and year, so I’ll post now, and go to bed.  See you next year!

Here are the full details of how I moved my blog from the Kiwihosting Unix servers to Windows, skipping all the missteps, so it’s more of a how I would redo it.

I was running 2.2.3 (as that was the latest version I could get working on the older server ) and I have WordPress located in the directory \blog on my domain.

1. Download the full old site via FTP to local dir c:\temp\old
2. Export Wordpress contents (in 2.2.3 Manage > Export) to (wordpress.<date>.xml)
3. Check-out the current SVN WordPress trunk to c:\temp\wp-trunk
   note: I was having errors with release 2.6.3, so had to try 2.7-beta3
4. Export trunk (c:\temp\wp-trunk) to c:\temp\wp27
5. Copy c:\temp\oldroot to c:\temp\newroot
6. Replace the c:\temp\newroot\blog\ directory with c:\temp\wp27 contents
7. Copy the Uploads c:\temp\oldroot\blog\wp-content\uploads\ to c:\temp\newroot\blog\wp-content\uploads\
8. Make a copy of the default theme, I did this just to simplify merging changes from SVN with my own changes.
   note: Change the header comment in c:\temp\newroot\blog\wp-content\themes\<theme name>\style.css so you can tell the difference between your new theme and the default.
9. Created domain in Helm
10. Install the Propagation Support (Home > Domain > simeonpilgrim.com > Application Packs) to access site via a temporary URL
11. Create DB, via Helm
12. Create DB Users account, after step 11 you see the details on the connection string (with dummy values), notice that the box below has an Add User button, use that
13. Configure wp-config.php to point to DB
    note: my database is on a non-standard port, so for the DB_HOST I added a port suffix so it looks like ’server.name.com:3306′
14. Create FTP User account
15. Upload full site (c:\temp\newroot\) to new server
16. Install WordPress
    note: use the temporary URL as the WordPress address (URL) otherwise you will keep getting redirected to your old (and live) server. If you make this mistake you can log into myPhpAdmin (near bottom of left side bar) to edit the DB directly.
17. Import WordPress contents wordpress.<date>.xml via Tools > Import
18. Install Plugins
    • WP-Mail-SMTP - This is very important, as it allows WordPress to send email
      For kiwihost you just need to set SMTP Host to “localhost” and Authentication to “No: Do not use SMTP authentication.”
    • Google XML Sitemaps
    • Google Analytics for WordPress
    • FD Feedburner Plugin
19. Fix Category slugs, any special character symbols get dropped when you import your old content, so for me the slugs for C# and C++ both became C, so I had to reassign the posts using those Categories
20. Change permalink format and turn on URL rewriting so it works
21. Change over DNS nameservers
22. If you have the site perfect, change the URL (Settings > General > WordPress address (URL)), otherwise do this after the next step
23. Wait a few days for DNS to roll-over
24. Remove the Propagation Support from step 10
25. Decommission old server and get 6 months free hosting for being so clever

As the title says, another test…