here i am at my new domain, with all of my blog posts intact, and things behaving pretty much as i want them to, for the time being at least.

yay!

it took a bit of work, though.

on saturday night, i started trying to import the posts from my old database into the new one. i backed up the tables that i wanted from my hoosiernet database and set about introducing myself to phpmyadmin, which is how bluehost wants me to interact with the database. that went just fine as such things go, and i was even prepared when the import feature didn’t work, because i had found this support thread in the wordpress forum that said that some people had to paste the query directly into the sql field to get it to work.

o… k…
so i tried that, and it still didn’t work.
it was timing out before it could get through the whole thing, and i couldn’t change that setting, so i was annoyed.

at this point, i started wondering about a question i had been pushing from my mind, which was: “why is this backup file so freaking big?!” david and i had backed up the whole database back in january to teach me how to do it (hoosiernet’s all shell access, so it’s fun with unix and friends), and it had been 4 MB. last month, when i started refreshing my memory and backing it up to prepare for upgrading and/or switching hosts, it was like 9, which i found a bit startling, but brushed aside because i have been blogging a lot more this year than i did last year, so it seemed possible…

when i backed it up a few days ago, however, it was 12 MB, and that was just silly. i didn’t understand how it could have possibly grown that much in a month, but i kept coming up with all these vague excuses, like “well, maybe david did something to compress it that you didn’t remember” or “maybe you put a… picture in the database… or a small… woodland… animal…”

wild, flailing shrug to distract attention from that suggestion

i was more worried about other aspects of the process, but then when it kept timing out because the file was too big i was forced to reconsider. so i started poking around in the file to see what it said, and it said:

“POKER! BLACKJACK! VIAGRA! PSEUDOETHOTHROMORITANIUMITE!”

for like a bajillion and a half lines

which made me go: “ok, hold up. i’m spending time futzing with figuring out how to import this file so that i can put megabytes upon megabytes of spam into my new clean database?!”

like hell you say

so i went into the admin menu for that nice spam plugin that i had installed a while back. you know, the one that was messing with you when you tried to leave comments? but was also catching up to 400 spam a day and keeping me from having to moderate them all? so i kept it anyway? yeah, that one.

and i clicked on the button to erase the old spam, and it said “there seems to be an error in your sql syntax near…”

and i smacketh myself on the forehead

fortunately, i remembered talk of a spam annihilation plugin from when i was first looking into the problem, and so i went and snagged it rather than try to puzzle out what was amiss with spam karma’s inner joins, because i don’t Like inner joins, and i was not interested in changing my position on the matter at this juncture.

so i installed the plugin, and a few short minutes later, i was greeted with:

heehee…

the computer said rowr…

which is another way of saying that the guy who made this plugin? he cracks my shit up. he also seems to be on the ball, and i am installing his notepad plugin as a part of my upgrade, so i’ll let you know how that goes.

anyway, then i backed things up again, and it was much much smaller. losing 5 MB of spam in a single click really does make those pants seem a whole lot baggier.

so i promptly started trying to import data again.

and it started timing out again.

and i went to bed.

yesterday i did other stuff, because my new idea was that it might have something to do with the slowness and patchiness of my wireless at home, so i decided to bring my computer somewhere where i could plug it in the old-fashioned way (my router is next door in my neighbor’s apartment, remember? so no walls for me.), which meant that i would take it to work today, which meant that i got to rejoice at how small and light it is, which meant that i was happy.

but it still didn’t work, so i was bothered. i poked around some more and confirmed a suspicion that i didn’t like, which was that i might have to just cut and paste the query in piece by stomachable piece until it was all done.

blah.

i tried it out with the category data, because that was short, and sure enough it did not time out. instead it gave me a new error about rows not matching values, and that was worrisome…

i used the wordpress codex (which is astonishing, btw. i have never had a question go unanswered after just a few minutes of searching, and people are adding to it all the freaking time. it’s a beautiful thing.) to find out what the fields were, and sure enough, there is a new field in the 2.0 category table (category count! get yours today!), so all my categories were missing a value.

sigh

this is annoying because i am going to get rid of categories soon in a grand tagging experiment, but i don’t want to lose the old data, and i only have like 30 categories, so (to david’s horror, i predict :), i went through and added the new values BY HAND.

that worked just fine, but then when i started submitting post data and it gave a similar error, i was like no way, no how am i even going to pretend to consider doing that by hand. i have other things to do in the next week and a half. like pack. and leave town.
so i had to figure out the right way to solve the problem, and the answer was: upgrade the old site to 2.0!

this is somewhat humorous, because i have been holding off upgrading for a few weeks now because i figured that there was no sense in it if i was going to be moving everything soon, but… oh well. the upgrade process includes a nifty script that modifies the database for me so that the backup would be updated automagically, and that is worth quite a bit of humor.

it went rather smoothly, apart from not working at all at first because it couldn’t access the configuration file. fortunately, i vaguely remembered something having to do with file permissions that we had to modify last time, and after briefly locking myself out of the wordpress directory entirely because i misremembered what safephp does, i fixed it, and found a geeky dashboard widget to boot.

w00t

then it was just a matter of some patient cutting and pasting, and it really wasn’t that bad after all, because it could handle quite a bit at once.

my fears that the upgrade would break my subpages was well-founded, it turns out, but in the meantime someone came up with a super-duper category visibility plugin that is way better than the workaround i had been using, so the problem was solved before it really even emerged. can’t complain about that outcome.

my theme doesn’t work with 2.0, though, and rather than download the new version and hack it to pieces again, i’m going to build my own.

but not today.

today i am too much for this blog world, as this insanely long post clearly shows.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 9:15 pm and is filed under on blogging, ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.