I gave up!

This blog was hacked again and the database taken down. As this is no longer my primary blog (and I post here infrequently now) I decided the best course of action would be to simply take it off my server and give it to WordPress.com to host (the chances of it being hacked there are remote!).

I have wanted to change the domain of the blog for quite some time as well so I decided to combine the two jobs into one.

I already owned TomRaftery.com and it was doing nothing so I decided to use this as it is a more appropriate url for the site.

To upload the site to WordPress.com I first created a blank WordPress.com blog (simply by signing up and verifying email – a 2 second job).

Then I went to my old site and created an export file (Tools -> Export) – this downloaded a 24mb xml file to my computer. When I went to the WordPress.com to do the import I spotted that the Import message read “Choose a file from your computer: (Maximum size: 15mb)”. Oops! – this was going to be an issue.

I thought about going into the xml file and manually editing it but when I opened it I saw it was over 400,000 lines long and I really didn’t want to mess it up so I thought again.

I checked the spam list on the site and I saw there were thousands of spam comments in there. What if I deleted them and tried again? I did and sure enough this knocked the xml file size down to 17mb – an improvement but still too large to import. What to do?

Then I had a brainwave (should have been obvious really) – what if I split the export into two files? So I tried it, I first exported all blog posts up until December 2006 and then I did another export of all the blog posts from January 2007 until the most recent post (November 2010).

This created two files of less than 15mb each which could now be imported. Would WordPress.com allow me to import two files totaling more than 15mb? I didn’t know but figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so try I did and it worked a treat!

Now that all my blog posts (and their associated comments, categories, tags, etc) were imported the next step was to associate it with the TomRaftery.com domain. This required me to update the nameservers for the domain to point to WordPress nameservers (after paying for the domain pointing service from WordPress). Then I had to set it as the primary domain for the site (see below).

The last step was to go back to the old TomRafteryit.net domain and set a permanent (301) re-direct on it so that people (and search engines) would be re-directed over here to the new TomRaftery.com domain – now safely hosted on WordPress.com servers.

So here we are. If you are reading this – welcome to the old blog on this new site. Thanks for taking the time and hopefully I won’t leave it so long to the next post!