Mini-Project: Moving a WordPress.com blog to own servers

It’s been about a month since I’ve migrated my blog from a hosted service at WordPress.com to hosting my WordPress blog on my own servers. So far, everything is doing quite alright especially the benefits of self hosting WordPress which gives me total control over my contents and my plugins.

So this is intended to be a guide plus some thoughts and recommendations for anyone who wants to move their blog from WordPress.com over to their own web host.

Moving from WordPress.com has advantages over moving from another service – pretty much all of your content can be migrated over without any loss of information. This includes posts, pages, categories, tags and even users if you have more than one. It’s also another reason why it is so easy to make the switch.

Why host your own WordPress?

For a while, my blog was hosted on WordPress.com. It was great – it was easy to set up, easy to use (especially with Live Writer), always available and best of all, it was all free.

But then, after a while there are some limitations that start to show up once you’ve used WordPress.com for a while. For a start, the URL that comes with your blog is in the form of http://<blog name>.wordpress.com/, and you can’t really change this your http://<blog name>.com or anything shorter. Well you could, but you’d have to pay USD$10 a year just so that you can use your own domain name and point it at your WordPress.com blog. Registering the actual domain name costs extra, of course.

Apart from the domain name, all of the WordPress.com feature upgrades turns out to be included when you host your own WordPress blog. This includes uploading videos, customising the CSS look and feel, none of their ads and the option to put your own ads in, unlimited users and as much disk space as your hosting provider gives you. If you’re already reaching or exceeding the free limits of WordPress.com, then why not change over?

There is actually a community of people whom self host the free and open source WordPress blog engine, which can be sourced from http://www.wordpress.org/.

Intended audience

This is a recount of the steps I took in migrating my blog. If you want to use this as a guide to do the same, then you would need prior knowledge or experience in setting up a basic web site.

The Procedure

The basic procedure involves exporting the contents of the blog posts from the old wordpress blog, and then importing it into the new self hosted WordPress installation. Although, there are some other things can be done to make it even more painless.

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Cloning directory in Windows with dummy files

Given an existing directory containing files and folders, how can I reproduce the same structure somewhere else on the hard drive (or otherwise), but instead of copying the full file contents, just have dummy files with the same name?

This question came from a question on Atomic MPC forums that I thought would be really simple on unix given the multitude of shell utilities, but might be a little tricky on Windows command prompt.

So first, we want to re-create present working directory structure, replacing “C:\test” with where you want the files to be placed:

for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /a:d /b /s') do @mkdir "C:\test%~pnxi"

Then, we’ll just write empty files for every name that we have in our current directory into the target directory.

for /f "delims=" %i in ('dir /a:-d /b /s') do @echo. > "C:\test%~pnxi"

So it’s not that difficult after all. Note that this won’t copy hidden files across – if you know you have them, then you probably know how to tweak the command to get them across too.

Enjoy.

Update: Here’s an explanation of how it works:

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e-Record 6 – can’t add a new business?

e-Record is a free tool offered by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to help small businesses keep records needed for tax reporting. It uses FileNet Desktop eForms application (now belongs to IBM), and it is terribly out of date (just like Windows XP).

So what happens when you install it on Windows Vista or Windows 7? Well it kind of breaks. I ran into a problem while trying out e-Record 6.1 build 3 on Windows 7 Ultimate x86, and it can be reproduced like this: add a new business, and click through the initial steps.

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Is this IP attacking my server?

Like many others, I maintain a server that runs 24/7 and it’s connected to the internet. Yesterday I came home to a most unusual sight on my server’s status LEDs – unexplained network activity. It’s unusual because for me, my server is almost always idle. It doesn’t serve web pages, and in fact it doesn’t really do much for the internet except for accepting SSH connections so I can access my home resources while away. So I thought I might want to investigate the cause of the suspicious network activity.

It was a good thing that username and password authentication have been disabled. My investigations after the break!

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Can you programme? The ACM ICPC Contest is soon!

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) is a programming competition for students in higher education that involves solving a number of interesting problems (roughly 10) within 5 hours using C/C++ and/or Java.

To enter, you must form a team of 3 people, and find a coach. If you ask around your computer engineering or IT school/faculty chances are there’ll be someone organising teams already. If not, ask them to be your team coach and to register you for the regional contest.

See the ACM ICPC South Pacific region site for more details!

For Sydney University, send an email to Taso Viglas or Judy Kay. UNSW: Hossam El Gindy.

Be quick, because the contest is happening this coming Saturday, 12 Sep 09.

Those who make the finals this year will be going to Harbin, China – home to the Ice Festival.