Creating this blog on its own server hasn’t been too difficult but there were some issues.

The import process knocked out all of the comments on these posts for a start. Also Clustrmaps, which like the hit count sites, are all domain specific so if I want Clustrmaps on the new site then it will depressingly start blank, as will the hit counts sites.

All of the posts that have been on Digg, and are still being pointed to from Digg, will need to stay on the old blog and will never point to the new blog version. Of course all new entries that I get Digg to look at will be pointed to the new version, so from now on that will switch. Maybe all entries on the old blog that aren’t pointed at by Digg can be deleted. Trouble is there are other pointers to some of these old entries can be found from Google and lord knows where else.

Lastly how do I get anyone who subscribes, via RSS, to resubscribe to the new blog. I think I have replicated all of the subscribe links and even display them in the same order, apart from the fact that they are currently buried at the bottom left of the page rather than where they should be at the top left. Maybe I should just take the hit and delete the old blog and be done with it.

That will trash my hit count for months.

Quote of the day

‘Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much’ John Wayne (1907-1979)

Tried a few plug-ins for wordpress blogs in an attempt to replicate this blog.

Seems quite straightforward. Find plug-in, download it, unzip it, FTP it to the plug-ins folder on the server and go to the plug-ins page on Wordpress and activate it.

Tried a few and a couple worked and a couple failed miserably. I don’t think I was attempting anything too adventurous just a hit counter. No doubt I wasn’t ’running it right’. Will try more later. I’m going to have fun with this.

The book I have been using is just too confusing. Now I have no doubt that the writer is an expert in the WordPress world but the distinctions in the book for the processing of WordPress.com blogs, hosted blogs and own hosted blogs are not clear at all. The section on servers was interesting but sent me down a few dead ends. It gave me the impression that I needed to install both Apache and MySQL which I duly did.

Wrong, you only need to do that if you are running your own server. If you buy web hosting then the hosting company run Apache to serve the pages and also provide you with the facility for creating a MySQL database on their server. Well they say create a database, but that’s it. I think it toddles off and does ‘create database mydatabase’. You aren’t required to stipulate any tables or anything else.

All sounds very obvious with hindsight but probably confused a few others too.

Quote of the day

‘If there were no God, there would be no Atheists’ G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Yup finally got the full version of WordPress working on the server.

Exported this blog to an XML file and imported it back into the new version. Oddly when I was looking at the WordPress area for importing from other blogs I don’t remember seeing an option for importing a blog hosted at wordpress.com itself. There was an option for an RSS feed so I fed it the XML export file.

The import thrashed around for a couple of minutes and finally told me it had successfully imported everything. The good news was that all of these entries were successfully imported along with the pictures. The bad news was that, and I’m sure it was my fault somewhere, every picture was also imported as a separate blog entry, all of the comments were lost as were the categories. Worse still was that every entry, including all of the dud entries for the separate pictures were given unique categories, all being blank, a total of about 500.

Removed all of the picture entries easily enough, created the correct categories and started to allocate blog entries to them and deleted the 500 no-name categories. That took a couple of hours. 

Its probably going to take the rest of the week to finish all of these edits plus adding the counters, links, RSS subscribes controls etc. Then my problem is how am I going to get any subscribers to stop subscribing to this blog and instead subscribe to the new version. Also how the heck I’m going to keep track of site visits across two sites, until such time as this version is sunk, is going to be fun too.

Quote of the day

‘We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office’ Aesop (620 BC – 560 BC)