I moved my blog to this domain last weekend. I researched the best ways to move a blog and found some good clear articles on moving a WordPress blog written by Podz.
Fundamental to moving your WordPress blog is backing up your current blog’s database and restoring it on your new server, so I followed the backup and restore instructions with the utmost of care.
However on trying to restore the database on the new server I received the following error:
#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax. Check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘cat_ID` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment
No amount of changing the syntax of the Create Table statement would get it work - hair was being pulled out in frustration!
I tried another tack. In phpMyAdmin, I clicked on the SQL tab and pasted the create table code directly in here from my saved .sql file (with no modifications) and it worked!
Having successfully created the table, I took the code from the .sql file for adding the data and ran that in the phpMyAdmin SQL tab and that worked as well.
I repeated this for all tables in my database and I soon had my database restored on the new server. Phew!
This site will be undergoing maintenance between 15:00 and 15:20 gmt today 14th of March 2005.
Downtime will be kept to a minimum but expect unexpected behaviour during that time.
Apologies for any disruption.
Tom
I have moved this blog from its old home at tomandpilar.net/tom to a bright, shiney new home here at tomrafteryit.net.
This whole site is run out of WordPress 1.5 - the move was a little scary - I’ll write it up later on as a guide for anyone else undertaking a similar project.
If you clicked on a link to get here and landed on the main page of the blog instead of the article you were looking for, use the search box on the right or the categories to find the article you wanted.
In the meantime, if you find any broken links on this site, please let me know and I’ll sort them out asap.
Thanks,
Tom.
The second step in a Search Engine Optimisation project is to get some metrics on the state of the site before the Optimisation project proper commences. If you missed the first step in this Search Engine Optimisation project, you can see it here.
To achieve this we will first need to carry out a benchmarking of the site’s current web traffic statistics to enable tracking of your ROI. There are several web stats analysis applications available for this task. The main free ones are Webalizer, AwStats and Analog and I find that using a combination of these tools is better than relying on any one. Mostly at this point we are looking for the amount of traffic to the site - we will be comparing this against the amount of traffic coming to the site as the project progresses.
Secondly, we will want to examine search engine rankings for various likely keywords or keyphrases target clients might use to find the site. Googlerankings, a website which allows you to look up the Google Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) of any site, for any keyword or phrase, is the main tool to use for this stage of the process. In the image below we can see that, not unsurprisingly, Microsoft.com have the no.1 Google SERP for the keyphrase Bill Gates:
To perform this step, however, we will need a list of keywords/phrases to use as our baseline. Some of these will be gleaned from the web traffic statistics in the previous step (what words and expressions have historically been used to find the site) and some will be ones which you want the site to be found by.
And finally, a technical audit of the existing site needs to be carried out. This audit needs to flag any issues that may currently be harming search engine ranking (i.e. Frames, Dynamic uri’s, Flash, image maps for navigation, and/or javascript for navigation). Any of these which are found need to be documented and plans put in place for their replacement with search engine friendly alternatives.
I will be writing up the next step in this project in the next couple of days.
In a previous post I explained how to create a .htaccess file to stop remote image linking (hotlinking) and bandwidth theft - however, there are some situations where you might want your image files linked to from remote sites - how do you make exceptions for these sites?
The code to block all sites from hotlinking to your images is, as follows (see my previous post for a detailed explanation of the code):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?tomrafteryit.net [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|gif|jpe?g)$ - [NC,F]
To allow Google, AltaVista, Gigablast, Comet Systems, and SearchHippo translators and caches to be able to link to images we need to use the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?tomrafteryit\.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://216\.239\.(3[2-9]|[45][0-9]|6[0-3]).*(www\.)?tomrafteryit\.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://babel.altavista.com/.*(www\.)?tomrafteryit\.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://216\.243\.113\.1/cgi/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://search.*\.cometsystems\.com/search.*(www\.)?tomrafteryit\.net [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://.*searchhippo\.com.*(www\.)?tomrafteryit\.net [NC]
RewriteRule \.(png|gif|jpe?g)$ - [NC,F]
And obviously, everywhere you see my domain (tomrafteryit.net) in the code, substitute in your own domain.
Comment spam plugins no longer required!
I have written many posts on my battles with WordPress comment spam but all that appears to be coming to a very satisfactory solution. I am now no longer using any comment spam plugins and I have stopped moderating comments on this blog.
How did I get to this enviable position? Well, it has been a long road and I have learned loads about WordPress along the way.
I started down this road by trying various comment spam plugins with different degrees of success. However, none were really satisfactory. The best one was WP-Hashcash - best in that it was most transparent to the user - but it requires commenters to have Javascript turned on in their browser. So I kept looking for another strategy to eradicate this scourge from my blog.
I upgraded from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5 (the current version) - WordPress 1.5 has a number of anti spam comment features natively built in.
Of these, I have set the number of links allowed in comments to 3 - any more than that, and the comment is auto-moderated.
I have populated the blacklist with a short list of words (just over 40) - any comments containing these words are automatically deleted - boom! No notification to me, no notification to the commenter.
I have written a custom .htaccess file which blocks a lot of potential spam commenters at the gates. Instructions on how and why I set it up are here.
And finally, I have installed Dr. Dave’s plugin Referrer Karma. I know, I know, I said I didn’t have any comment plugins, but I don’t. Referrer Karma is a referrer spam plugin which just happens to work like my .htaccess file (but much more elegantly) to block the bad guys at the gates.
The combination of these measures has allowed me to turn off moderation on the comments on my blog - and so far (one week later) no comment spam has made it through my defences. I’m not saying the war is over but, so far, I seem to have won this round.