Self-Hosting Experience

This is a huge milestone for me in fulfilling the blogging goals I have laid out for 2010. Thanks to OurChurch I am now able to host my blog there and take the blogging experience to a whole new level. I hope that my goal to be more engaging and community based will be realized through all the things I have planned for Synaptic Light over 2010; Self Hosting is the first step towards that – in a very big way. So I encourage you to please help me by taking the conversation past the one man with a bull-horn to a community of communicators, by taking part in the conversation.

My experiences in setting up the blog on the remote site took a bit of a complicated route, but at least I learned some lessons. When I host my Son of Mine blog then I will be able to apply those lessons. Here they are for you. Hopefully they can serve as an aid for others who find themselves in the same position:

Exporting the posts, comments, etc

This is the easy part, but can take long depending on the size of your blog. Best you get yourself a cup of coffee while you wait.

Select Tools | Export – The options available are for restricting the posts exported to a specific author. I have been the only author so this did not matter – pity, it would have been great to worry about this

The select Download Export File. Select the location. The name is set as wordpress-’year’-'month’-'day’.xml. Now save it and get that cup of coffee, or tea if you prefer. Maybe stay away from the hard stuff, lol.

Created Local WordPress Install

Probably a wise move under all circumstances. Ultimately it would be best to make all changes locally and then copy them across when you are done. With this in mind I set myself up for my biggest mistake.

I thought that I could create the wordpress environment on my laptop, import the xml from the previous step, then when everything was running smoothly then I could copy it all across. Did anyone think Database – dahhhh.

I must have lost a 6 or 7 hours trying to move the database across and when I had tried to run sql in separate chunks I still needed to make a number of string replacements. In hindsight it may have been better to create the worpress installation, setting up the database through wordpress and importing the xml on the remote site. In my defense I could not import the xml due to the error:

Remote file error: Remote server did not respond

Anyway, after copying the install across and migrating the database across I still had to replace all the links which I had to do by running the following sql statements  (Best to BACKUP your database, not like I did, sorry, I set a bad example):

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'oldurl', 'newurl') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid,'oldurl','newurl');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'oldurl', 'newurl');

where old url will probably be http://localhost:8888 if you were using MAMP the way I did. And my newurl is http://synapticlight.com

The resources where I found useful information on this:

• Changing The Site URL
• How to Move WordPress Blog to New Domain or Location

Problems with Adding Images

I was not able to load an image through the Add Media menu item or the post’s media uploader.  At first I was getting the error:

Error saving media attachment

After scrounging the Interwebs and trying different solutions I was able to solve the problem in these steps:

1. In my wl_options table change the upload_path to “wp-content/uploads”. It was still pointing to /Applications/MAMP … which was another of the symptoms of my approach.
2. Seeing the HTTP Error in the flash uploaded I quickly realized that I was missing the .htaccess file with the contents




<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

3. But then I still had to at least change the permissions to my uploads folder right down to the lowest level which might not have been necessary if I had imported the XML through wordpress.

The resources where I found useful information on this:

• WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Error [Wordpress Fix]
• Using Permalinks

Widget Problems

I knew that the Thesis Theme I was using supported Widgets, but for some reason the Widgets available would not budge. I had to select Screen Options at the top right corner and set Accessibility to on. That provided me with a Text link: Add on the widget, allowing it to be added to the correct sidebar and position by means of drop down lists.

[Photo by: Skies for me]