The story behind my website’s new look

You might have noticed that my blog has a new theme! It’s wonderful that with WordPress, changing to a new theme only takes a few mouse clicks.

However, there was a bit of drama behind why I made the change – unfortunate, but a valuable experience indeed. My website was hacked.

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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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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.

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?

Move to edmundtse.com – success!

Good news, my blog has a new home at edmundtse.com!

I’ve spent the past day and a bit moving my blog from being hosted at wordpress.com to my own domain. As at now, my blog has now been moved over to its new home, so this post will be the last one for this blog.

So if you want to subscribe to my blog, then please use its new home, because I foresee that this one won’t be updated any more. I wish that wordpress.com had a function that lets me divert existing visitors using HTTP 301.

Thank you for your support!