Hideho everybody. Two years after getting the notion to do it, I have finally completed the move of my blog to my own server. The main reasons is to make me the captain of the blog’s destiny, as opposed to WordPress. (Non-poetic version: I want to manage my own plugins, themes, and general look for the site — particularly important as my business expands and I might use this for something other than just writing about BCC.)
Process to move a blog from WordPress.com to your own server:
1) Register domain name
2) Go to WordPress.com and set your blog’s domain as the one you’ve just registered. This will cost you $10 a year.
3) Wait several months while Google gradually gets the notion that yourblog.wordpress.com is really www.yourdomain.com (WordPress will 301 redirect to your new domain IF AND ONLY IF you continue paying them the $10 a year — its a steal, do it).
4) At your hosting provider of choice, install the WordPress software. You’ll probably want to configure it under a test subdomain for the moment (I used a domain I keep lying around for just such an occasion).
5) From WordPress.com, export a dump of all your posts & etc.
6) Import the dump into your self-hosted blog. If your blog export was over 2 MB (mine weighed in at 2.1), you can have the import succeed by finding your php.ini file and changing the max_upload_size setting line — it should read “max_upload_size = 10MB;”
7) Test blog, see that most stuff continues to work.
8) Go to your domain registrar and change the DNS entries for your domain from ns1.wordpress.com, etc, to the DNS entries for your hosting provider. Wait a few minutes.
9) Turn on Akismet for your new blog or you’ll be spam city before you know it. I got 50 lovely comments welcoming me to my new digs within the first 15 minutes. They all seemed to be by people who work in the pharmaceutical industry.
And, of course, you can play around with your settings, themes, plugins, and etc. I’ve gone ahead and used the Leviathan theme (customized very mildly with a custom title image — 5 minutes in Paint.NET, will probably replace it with a real image done by my art guy later) and installed a plugin to finally allow me to do some decent syntax highlighting here. Hopefully that will induce me to post code more often.
Tell me if you notice anything greviously wrong about the blog!
Then let me be the first human to welcome you to your new server. Thanks for all the Micro-ISV experience and information you’ve been sharing.
Congrats on the move – I made the same move to http://www.saidsvec.com from my wordpress.com blog just last week, I was going to write the same article – thanks! ;-)
Hey, this is a nice looking layout. Nice work!
The navigation links in the header could stand out a bit more, it’s the only thing that I would change. Blends into the background (I’ll admit to being slightly color blind though).
This layout is way better than your previous. I like it.
Your 8) turns into a smiley
I get an RSS feed of your blog from Planet MicroISV and got a link of http://kalzumeus.com/?p=533 for your “98, 99, 100!” post, but when I navigate to the blog, it sends me to the “About” page. The link for the same article on the new server is http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/02/26/98-99-100/.
I suspect this is only temporary for RSS users, but those who have links might like you to provide a 301 redirection to the new URLs. Otherwise, the site looks great (another vote for the new theme) and I heartily endorse the use of more readable URLs.
I agree, Scott. I picked one which gave a little more horizontal space — it specifically said “good for wordy posts”, which is what I specialize in. Hah, take that, internal editor, now I can be as redundant as I want.
Scott, the RSS issue should be fixed. PlanetMicroISV must have crawled me right after I had done the import but before I realized that my permalinks were set to the WP default rather than the pretty ones I usually favor. The RSS links look OK now, as does PlanetMicroISV’s copy.
I like the new layout. Looks good in several browsers too, so no worries there.
The code coloring threw me, since it doesn’t color in Google Reader, but looks fine on the blog itself. :)
Previously I could access your blog with http://kalzumeus.com, now it needs “www”. Could it be because of DNS? Or maybe you can turn on option to have your site accessible with and without “www”.
you need to add a DNS entry and 301 redirect for non-www domain. Google search for “microisv shoe string” shows your domain without www, and http://kalzumeus.com is not reachable.
Thanks guys. I’ll take care of it later today. (Its about five seconds if I had access to Slicehost but I doubt my bosses would be too keen on me taking time to do it at work.)
Taking things into your own destiny also means keeping updates and patches for the engine and all the plugins…
Which is why I chose to live with the limitations, as I found it was distracting from my main goal of writing a blog.
Thanks for this post, I am interested in.
Love your writing style and the design of your blog, its very original! Well done, look forward to reading more.
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