Welcome to my new site

If you’ve made it this far, thanks!

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So I moved my blog off of Blogsome, which is a free hosting service for WordPress blogs.

Why? A few reasons:

• Their server had little unreliable periods where it would vanish for a day or two at a time, really putting a damper on the whole immediacy thing.
• I wanted a little room to stretch my legs. I’ve got more control over what this blog looks like, and Ican update and change it quicker and easier. I’ll add a few more pages to this Web site soon, so that I don’t have to start another blog to post things I write for school, or a resume, or photographs.
• This URL is way cooler.

Cool things about Blogsome:

• It’s free.
• They cheerily sent me everything I needed to move my blog to another server, with the notable exception of a working knowledge of how to mess with a mySQL database properly…more on this in a moment.
• WordPress is cooler than Blogger, and easier for first-timers to get the hang of, with less messing around in the code.

Boring Technical Stuff That I Know Very Little About…

About that “How To Move Your Blog From Blogsome To Your Own Server” instruction book… well there isn’t one, really, but let me see if I can reconstruct a few crucial bits of the process:

• First things first: contact someone at Blogsome and let them know you’re moving your blog and you’d like the relevant files. Go to the Blogsome Forums, register if you haven’t, and send a Private Message to rogerg or jamesf. They will most likely email you your mySQL database dumped into some sort of compressed file — James was rather nice about sending me this in a couple different forms. I ended up using mostly the individual .db files he sent (i.e. wp_ryansholin_posts.db).
• These files – you need to make all the references to your Blogsome database (the “ryansholin” part) disappear. Make all of those look like “wp_posts” instead. Also look for any instances of your old URL and change it to your new one. I didn’t fully complete that process – there’s probably some posts that are linking to my old blog, but so be it.
• Okay, so the wp_posts file you’ve got now may or may not be woefully devoid of actual content – pay attention here, this is where the instinct kicks in – find some other big database dump the guys sent you and find the part with the posts. Copy/paste that sucker in where it makes sense.
• Here’s the fun part: this is how it worked with my files, whatever versions of WordPress I was switching between, or however things run on different servers – whatever – the point is, you gotta do the following thing: in all those pretty little files (i.e. wp_posts and wp_comments, etc.) there’s a line of code that says:
  “) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;” REPLACE that bit with this: “) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=2 ;”

Your mileage may vary. For the rest of the *oh* so fun figuring out how to use your mySQL database thingie, check out the WordPress Codex bits on backing up/restoring your files – it will make sense at some point in the day when everything suddenly slides into place and you jump up yelling the expletive of your choice and the cat runs for cover. Or not. Good Luck.