Soapbox Rants and Raves

I finally am back in the the blogging business. Moving the actual domain from my local machine to Bluehost was pretty simple, most of the problems I encountered were self induced!! It was a little more tricky to move my WordPress site from one domain (home.beilers.com) to another (beilers.com), but not really very hard.  Things to be aware of:

1. Kind of funny, the support staff knew exactly how to answer my question, just like a script! After you export your data from your old database and import into the new database, you need to change two (2) rows in the wp_options table,  ids #1 and #39 need to be updated to the new domain URL. Nice magic numbers!
2. All of my images were missing in the old posts after the migration, good thing I don’t use a lot of them! Unfortunately after I imported the data, I realized that the full (old) URL was specified in all the <img src=””> tag attributes . I had to go through each post and change it to the new URL and path. Kind of a drag; I probably could have written a database query to do the update, but it just seemed easier to update them by hand! If I would have been more aware, I could have done a global search and replace in the exported text file; that would have been too easy!
3. There was another small import/export problem. Anywhere I used “quotes” around words, the quote (“) character was displayed in some encoded format, about 5 or 6 characters in length. I don’t remember the exact sequence, but it was pretty visible on the page, especially if you had them in a title. I might have been able to chose an alternative export format to better handle this situation, but by this time, it was too late and I really did not want to start over!
4. Don’t copy over you plug-ins, it is better to just reinstall them. I simply copied over all my plug-ins and content; which mostly seemed to work.  However when I hit the clean cache button on my wp-super-cache plug-in, it toasted my site (no longer accessible!). I was on the phone with the support team for about 30 minutes. They gave me a little scolding, but are generlly very nice people!  I can’t say enough about how helpful they are…
5. If you do move your site over, your image upload directory will probably be wrong too. Just go into your WordPress admin panel and update the upload directory to the appropriate location on the server, under your new WordPress installation. I only discovered this after ScribeFire refused to upload new images.
6. There was one other weird thing, my WordPress account for wp-stats (as well as my Linked.com blog linkage) seemed to take a couple of days to synchronize with the new domain name, the old home.beilers.com reference was there for several days after the switch. It finally switched over to beilers.com this week. All I can say, is ignorance is bliss!

I’m very happy with Bluehost and my decision to migrate over to their servers. I’m set for at least 3 years now, I hopefully won’t have to go through this exercise for quite some time!