My WordPress to WordPress.com migration experience
(Editor’s Note: because I got frustrated with the migration process and the problems I detailed below, and because I’m terribly impatient, I decided to move my blog back to my own domain and maintain WordPress myself. I’ll leave this post here for a little while in case it is useful to anyone else considering the switch, or in the unlikely event that someone from WordPress.com sees this entry.)
By now, I should be aware that my hunches and intuitions rarely turn out well.
Earlier today I got the bright idea to move my blog to WordPress.com. Since I run your basic, run of the mill blog, I thought it might be a good idea to save time and money by letting WordPress take care of the hassles of upgrading, server maintenance, and bug squashing. It isn’t as though I don’t have the technical chops to do these things myself, but I find that these things sometimes get in the way of creating content, and I’m all for anything that might make creating content a more pleasant experience.
I’d read Marshall Krotscheck’s thoughts on WordPress.com and how it compared to TypePad. There’s a lot of back and forth, and a lot of chest bumping going on in that piece and in the comments, but I walked away from the piece with the idea that moving my self-hosted blog to WordPress.com would be a Sunday walk in the park.
It wasn’t.
My domain resolved within the hour, and all seemed well. I’ve temporarily lost mail for this domain because it takes Google five days to release a Google Apps for Domain account, but I don’t get much email at this domain anyway, so that’s the least of my worries.
The greatest annoyance was that even though I suspected I had everything set up correctly, the domain mapping would not point to the correct address. It worked for about 10 minutes this afternoon, but stopped with absolutely no warning. I would try to pull up cecily.info, and I’d be greeted with the empty root directory of my former domain.
Hardly an optimal solution.
I tried again a few hours later, and still no domain mapping. Then, like a bright flash of sunshine on a dreary, overcast day, the mapping started working again around 10:00 pm. I started adding widgets to the sidebar and promptly lost the domain mapping yet again.
Two hours have passed since I experienced the last mapping snafu, and I’m not totally convinced that I won’t see it again over the course of the next 72 hours. I’ve also noticed a few limitations between WordPress.com and a self-hosted WordPress blog, namely that WordPress.com doesn’t allow custom JavaScript (except for Google and YouTube). I’ve lost Apture functionality, something I’ve come to really depend on for enriching blog posts, and I’ve also lost the ability to post tweets to my sidebar. Anil Dash was right to point this out in his response to Krotscheck. Not only that, WordPress.com has such a limited number of widgets available that the limitations of having WordPress.com host your blog far outweigh the benefits of this arrangement.
I still think that there’s value in hosted blog solutions, and it’s a feature that continues to grow in popularity as more bloggers decide that they don’t have the skills to monkey around in code, or that they just don’t have the time to tinker the way they used to. I’m going to keep this blog here for the next little while (especially since I’ve dropped $25 on mapping and the ability to edit CSS), but I’m seriously thinking of signing up for a TypePad account and kicking their tires for a bit.
Update: I thought it might be useful for future reference (and in case anyone at WordPress is watching) to keep a list of bugs/weird behaviour I’ve encountered since making the switch:
- If I go to cecily.info while logged in to wordpress.com and click the “Edit This” link on any post, I get a 500 internal server error.
Short attention span theatre
I’ve been everywhere and nowhere the last few weeks. My attention has been diverted elsewhere; namely with Plurk and FriendFeed. I’m a bit over Twitter, but rooting for it to get up off the ropes and deliver a knock-out punch to the upstarts.
I spent a little time in Seattle with friends old and new. Each time I see these people I come home a little sadder than the time before. There was once a time when I used to make excuses for my largely online social life, but I’ve come to understand that reality is relative: if these people feel real to me, if they return the love I give out, if they spend the time either virtually or in person, then they’re every bit as real as people I’ve known for most of my life. Friends are friends – they don’t need modifiers.
And yes, I’m determined to become more involved with the Vancouver bloggers scene. Next Tuesday I’m going to a Vancouver Bloggers meetup that Raul is organizing. He’s one of the first Vancouver bloggers I reached out to who actually reached back. He’s a great writer, a recent Ph.D. graduate, and seems to take an interest in other people, something I’ve found lacking in the seven-plus years I’ve been here. Of course, it could be my introvert talking, and we all know she’s an unreliable narrator.
Update: it seems Raul has accepted a challenge to eat at The Brave Bull, a legendary (and I use that word loosely) restaurant on Vancouver’s East Side. Seeing as how he’s eating there on Monday, I’ll have to watch his blog to see if he lives long enough to make it to the Vancouver Bloggers meetup on Tuesday.
These photos prove without a doubt that I work for the coolest library system on the planet. As part of our “One Book, One Vancouver” city-wide book club, the library staged a boxing demonstration on Library Square this afternoon. Author Karen X. Tulchinsky was also in attendance, and not only did she read from her novel, she threw a few practice punches as well.
links for 2008-06-10
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A lengthy but very helpful guide to migrating a WordPress site to Drupal by Shelly Powers
A sampling of press reactions to Obama’s victory
Gerard Baker of the the London Times asks Can Obama make American dream come true?:
“Every American child learns at a parent’s knee the most fundamental of truths about their country. Anyone can grow up to be president of the United States. It is the essence of the nation’s republican ideal, the meritocratic belief at the core of its organising principle. It is also, at least empirically speaking, complete balderdash.
In 220 years a country that has steadily multiplied in diversity, where ethnic minorities and women have risen to the very highest positions in so many fields of human life, has chosen a succession of 42 white men as its leader. For good measure, the vice-presidency, the only other nationally directly elected position in the US government, has been held by a succession of 46 white males
But last night, in a tumultuous break with this long history, the ultimate realisation of the American dream moved a little closer, and a black man became his party’s nominee for the presidency. “
(Incidentally, Baker’s the only one who called out BHO’s reference to Hillary’s involvement in future universal healthcare legislation for what it is – an admission that he isn’t thinking of offering her the Veep nomination)
Canada’s The Globe and Mail says Clinton’s narcissism cost her the victory:
Entitlement is a dangerous and inexcusable characteristic in any candidate. No individual, even one as talented and as well-connected as Ms. Clinton, is entitled to lead his or her country; to do so is an enormous privilege and responsibility that must be earned. In democratic countries, few dynasties will be sustained in the absence of humility.
The editorial board of The Age (Australia), believes Obama has already made history:
Senator Obama was raised by his mother and grandmother, and in earlier stages of his political career had to endure whispers in some quarters that somehow his upbringing and life experience had made him more white than black. Apart from being in themselves racist, such taunts miss the point: Barack Hussein Obama chose to identify with black Americans and their aspirations, while also presenting himself as a candidate who can offer Americans a new beginning by transcending their racial divisions. And in the nomination battle that has just ended, he stayed on that message, despite great provocation from those who chose to exploit the fears of the working-class whites who comprise the Democrats’ core constituency.
But the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says Senator Obama demonstrated his “deaf ear for the past” in choosing to give his victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota:
He has always seemed less interested in the American past, except perhaps as a rich source of grievance. So he might not have appreciated the historic vibes of the site in beautiful downtown St. Paul, which is where Walter Mondale delivered his concession speech after one of the most lopsided defeats in the history of American presidential elections — Ronald Reagan’s 49-state sweep in 1984…Unhappily, in matters historical he does seem remarkably tone-deaf. For his last hurrah of the primary season, he chose a place associated with one of his party’s great defeats. It’s as if admirers of George Armstrong Custer were to gather at Little Bighorn, aka Custer’s Last Stand, to proclaim victory.
Well, not everyone’s totally in the tank, it seems.
Living History
I just wanted to document this for posterity:
No tears in my eyes, but I’m feeling a chest-bursting sense of pride coupled with a knuckle-whitening fear for this man’s life and the life of his family. My mom’s been looking for a way to get me to start going to church — this historical moment might’ve been just the thing to push me toward that direction.
it’s da first of the month
meins…, originally uploaded by supeermario.
Grab your bunnies and come on…
(Rabbit, rabbit – get it? Two rabbits? HAR!)
Apple Canada: Movie downloads coming!
Could it be? Could all my whining about the sorry state of Apple’s product releases in Canada have had an effect (not bloody likely)? First it was the news that the iPhone would soon be available to Canadian customers, and now, thanks to iLounge, we find out that Canadian Apple customers will soon be able to download movies via the iTunes store.
Finally, that video iPod of mine might actually be useful.
