Archive for the ‘WordPress’ tag
Moving WordPress – My Story!
Well! this topic is well covered here, and probably repeated all over the web. But I am going to write this post any way. Because my WordPress move went quite well. And here is how it was done.
Everything Starts with Taking a Backup
A move is as simple as a backup and restore. You back up your old host and restore it at your new host. That is all you got to do if your domain name/blog URL is not going to change. Backing up has two steps. You need to back up your database and you also need to back up your files. You don’t need t back up entire home directory or public_html folder. If you have wp-content folder backed up that’s good enough. Because that’s where all your Thames, plugins and uploaded files are stored. If you have access to cpannel this is a very simple task. Otherwise you may need to use one of those plugins which allow you to back up the database and files.
Buying Local is Overrated, At least for Web Hosting!
When it comes to buying services and complex products I always prefer buying from a local seller. This makes it easy to communicate and handle any matter that might come up when using the product or service that we buy. But in some cases the typical Sri Lankan customer relationship attitude make it a nightmare.
This happened way too often with my hosting provider. To be specific the X hosting provider. Not that this blog is some mission critical application, but when ever there is a problem with servers or downtime, a simple proactive mail from the host can save lot of time for customers. Instead they just make us panic and wonder what is going on. And in most of such incidents it takes ages to get a response from them.
Automatically Add Name Attribute for Google Syntax Highlighter
If you write programming related posts in your blog, you are most probably using Google Syntax Highlighter to highlight your code snippets. In case if you don’t, it’s a set of javascripts that allows you to add syntax highlighting for source code that you post on your blog. It supports a large number of programming languages. After installing “Google Syntax Highlighter for WordPress” plugin (If you are using WordPress of course), all you got to do is to enclose your code inside “pre” tags, add a name attribute with value ‘code’ and then set the language of programming code in class attribute.
Ex:-
<pre name="code" class="java"> .... </pre>
But there is a slight problem. When you use it with WordPress WYSIWYG post editor all the name attributes get removed. Therefore every time you change the post using WYSIWYG editor you have to go back to HTML view and add name attributes again. Which is really a pain if your post is a large one with lots of text and code snippets.
Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Installing Essential Plugins
Moving to own hosting gives you full control to do pretty much anything under the code of conduct of your new host. And having a domain of your own is kind of cool 
. But be careful when you ask for full control! Because you will get exactly full control. And you will be on your own. WordPress.com installs a quite a number of plugins for you and make them work seamlessly. But after moving to own hosting you have to do those thing on your own.
As soon as you setup WordPress and log in to dashboard you will realize few things. Dashboard does not look the same. Lots of things are not there. Even the Akismet spam filter is not working. You might even have a brief moment of panic. There is a lot of work to do.
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Getting It Up and Running“. In this post I am writing about the plugins that you will need to make your new blog work at least in the same way your WordPress hosted blog did. If you haven’t setup your blog on your own hosting, may be you can start by reading my earlier post. If you have no plan to host a blog on your own, you don’t need to read this post.
Moving from WordPress.com to Own Hosting – Getting It Up and Running
I just moved this blog to RaKasUniverse.info domain from a free blog at WordPress.com. When I moved the domain I also moved to own hosting. Reasons for this is not 100% clear even for me. I was a bit frustrated about not being able to install my own plug-ins, not being able to write java script code, and lots of other things that I find fun and interesting as a hobby programmer. I know I can do pretty much all that on blogger. That’s why I said it’s not 100% clear.
Setting up WordPress on own hosting is not that easy. That’s what I read in most other blogs. It may be so for a non technical person if you are setting it up full manual. But based on WordPress installation guide it’s not that complicated. Even with the manual steps you just need to upload WordPress files, set up a database and configure WordPress using wp-config.php file. But if you use Fantastico you just need to do few clicks and it’s done.
In this post I am trying to share my experience of moving to self hosting probably with some pointers for any one who is planing to do the same.
New Domain, New Host, New WordPress…!
Well, couple of days ago I felt like moving my blog off the free WordPress.com hosting. I did not have a real need of it, but I just felt bit restricted by all the restrictions there. Not that I could not live with those restrictions, but my mind just hit some kind of a critical point at which it made me go and by a domain + hosting.
I found this place called lkservers.com. They had a pretty attractive hosting package which included 10Gb of Storage, 100Gb/month of transfer, and pretty much everything else I needed\ for just LKR 1500/= (Aprox 15 USD) per year. So I went for it. Also As soon as I set things up here I noticed that new WordPress 3.0 is out. I am not the kind of guy who installs shining new software. I normally wait until it prove itself to be stable. But for some strange reason I installed it right away even without doing a very basic reading about it. So far nothing is broken. I am hoping for the best. Otherwise I will have to find a way to revert everything back.
