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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Broken links (mostly) fixed

Right. A little while ago, I’ve reported that I’ve broken a lot of the links since the move to a new domain name due to the fact that they still pointed to my blog’s old place at WordPress.com (and I’ve locked down my blog so it’s inaccessible). Now I’ve managed to fix it in a way that’s not the most convenient but is effective nonetheless.

I re-exported the blog using WordPress’s export function, which gave me an XML file containing all my blog contents. I did a massive find and replace on all links, and then imported to a new WordPress installation. Simple concept, and works beautifully. The only drawback is the amount of manual work required to set up the blog from scratch again.

Another way I could have done it was by searching through the entries in the database, and changing the links that way, but I kind of feel more comfortable just doing a find and replace on a text file. Maybe I’ll play around with databases a bit later.

The broken links that are left existed from before the move, and it’s good to finally have the tools (WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin) to report such issues. With a wordpress.com blog, you don’t get that luxury.

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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Broken links everywhere since the move

It occurred to me that there are now broken links everywhere since I have moved my blog from WordPress.com to my own server. So why is this problem popping now, a while after the move?

Well it’s because I’ve recently flicked the kill switch on my old blog. All the files, photos and links that pointed to my blog at its old location will no longer work (since I’ve killed them off) so it’s become broken.

So it’ll be a while until I manually go and fix up those broken links one by one, unless someone has a better idea of how to rewrite the links automatically?