Getting out of Godaddy Value App, Serendipity to WordPress

Posted by on Jun 2, 2006 in Random Blabber | 6 comments

If you are seeing this without visual bugs, then I have successfully done it. Specifically, I’ve done two things:

  1. Got out of Godaddy’s Value Applications and moved into another host
  2. Transferred data from Serendipity to WordPress

These two tricky problems have been the focus of my attention while deciding to make a change with this blog. It may seem simple to a Php/MySQL expert programmer. To me, a non-programmer, it has proved quite a challenge.

Getting Out of Godaddy

The first problem was to get out of Godaddy Value Applications. Let me describe it a bit. I signed up for a Godaddy Php Basic Hosting service. When I did I was presented with some readily-available web applications. I liked this since I didn’t want to spend to much time on the installation of programs I needed.

Since I wanted to start a blog, I looked for what was available. At the time, one of the choices was Serendipity Version 0.8. Since I didn’t know much about blogs, I just installed it and played around with it. I discovered that it would not install to the root of the domain. It installed within a folder. So my website’s blog was not www.jozzua.com. It was only www.jozzua.com/serendipity.

I thought, “Ok this is fine, I’ll just create a index.html that autoforwards to the folder.” So I just plugged in the code, worked onthe blog and forgot about this detail while the months passed by.

I soon discovered that some people found the autoforward annoying. Not only that, while I read about Search Engine Optimization, redirects/autoforwarding is greatly frowned upon. Apparently, this affects a website pagerank on Google Search.

Thus I began to fix this little detail. I’m not really a programmer, so I searched for information on how to do it. I Copy-Pasted the folder contents and tried to move it to the root directory, redid the config files, and so on. I wasn’t happy with the results.

I tried looking for the database of the serendipity blog so that I would create an SQL dump (basically download a backup of the database). Apparently, this database was in some other host. I couldn’t find it on my list of available databases. Sure enough, when I checked on the configurations listed within Serendipity, I found that it was linked somewhere that I couldn’t access.

The solution came as I browsed through some GoDaddy forums. There is a nice Software that allowed “http tunneling” access to SQL. The program is called WebYog. I downloaded the windows version of the software and promptly installed it. There is a php webpage within the webyog directory I had that I needed to upload within my Godaddy website directory. I did so, ran program and was very happy to connect to the ‘hidden’ SQL database. I got my SQL dump.

Great. I moved to my new webhost, uploaded my entire serendipity folder, reinstalled the web app, and uploaded the SQL dump. The website was up and running.

Serendipity to WordPress

The next order of business was to move my entire blog from the Serendipity to the WordPress Engine. I liked Serendipity a lot. I gave me a lot of flexibility on the html code and had a number of useful and friendly plugins. However, I soon discovered that most of the other Filipino Bloggers I’ve met were all on WordPress. I checked it out and found that the blog system itself was quite mature, had a lot of support, and a vast array of plugins. One interesting thing I noted was that it is generally easier to interact with other WordPress bloggers (thru the trackbacks). Although Serendipity had its own trackback system, somehow it seemed easier to communicate with others on the same engine. Since most of the other people I interacted with was on WordPress, it made sense to move to that system as well.

This however, gave me a problem. I had made a number of articles already when I started blogging early this January 2006. I had to move all the posts I had from Serendipity to WordPress.

Going through the admin options, I discovered that this was not going to be easy. Serendipity had an ‘export’ option. This would create a link to an RSS feed displaying all the posts that have ever been written. Unfortunately, if you had the habit of dividing your article to an introductory part, and a full/main body, you would discover that the RSS export feed only displayed the introductory parts.

It’s a habit to create a introductory for your articles. This is something like a teaser. It gives readers an idea of what the topic of the article is and invites them to continue reading. Blogs typically do this so that you can display a number of different articles on the index page.

On serendipity, there were two clear distinctions for the intro and the main part of an article. As I understood it, it also went to two different fields on the database side. In contrast, WordPress allows you to post your entire article and put a “divider” tag that would automatically cut it into intro/main parts. (You would understand if you used wordpress).

Going back to the serendipity export, I had to move all my article contents on the intro part because the RSS export would only show this part. It took me some time but I was eventually able to do it. I downloaded and saved the RSS export as an XML file.

I then promptly installed the wordpress blogging system on my new domain. On the admin side of wordpress is an import option. It did not have import from Serendipity. It had an import from RSS option. This is what I clicked on.

I had a working local copy of WordPress and imported the Serendipity RSS file. I discovered that the import of the RSS file would cause a “time-out.” I think the RSS file is too big or too long. The import would go on for a few minutes then stop. The message indicates something like a ‘server-timeout’. I had to do this several times until all the RSS feed contains were uploaded in wordpress.

I thought I was successful. I basically did the same thing for the actual domain. I repeated uploaded the RSS feed up to wordpress.

It wouldn’t work. I guess the RSS file is really just to big (or my Internet connection too slow).

I thought. “The hell with it.. I’ve spent too much time on this already.” I went back to my local copy of wordpress, browsed the post-tables on the local wordpress database and ran an SQL commands to recreate the tables. I did the same thing for categories table.

Viola! I now had all the articles on my new wordpress blog!

Still Some Problems

There are some details that I couldn’t fix:

  • I could not successfully export/import the Serendipity Comments. It would seem that I’d have to re-input all the comments back up on wordpress.
  • All my links from Serendipity had some sort of tracker-URL. It did not link immediately to the referred website. Instead it would lead to an internal link that would then autoforward to the website. Due to this, all the links on my previous posts have to be edited and fixed.

Well that’s it. I hope you found some value in my experience.

More To read:

  1. Smile and Get The Negative Thoughts Out!
  2. How to read all your favorite websites from one page
  3. Other Thoughts for 2007-11-05
  4. Other Thoughts for 2007-11-05
  5. Apple iPads @ 23K : MCI-ECS Warehouse Sale, Sept 13-16

6 comments

  1. elaine
    2 Jun ’06

    Bok! wow, new look!
    I like the more neat looking Categories, Archives and listing of the recent entries on the left side.
    And this is a quite interesting post.. more lengthy than the other ones too.

  2. adubi
    16 Jul ’06

    I managed to import comments from Serendipity yo WordPress. I assume that
    1) You have import all your entries with RSS
    2) You got access to your SQL server and hav
    3) You have a PHP server

    Then you could use the following code after making a backup of your comments and post tables

    0″;
    $result = mysql_query($sql,$dbi);
    while($array = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
    $sql2 = “SELECT * FROM “.$wp.”posts WHERE post_title=’”.utf8_encode($array['title']).”‘ LIMIT 1″;
    $subresult = mysql_query($sql2,$dbi);
    while($subarray = mysql_fetch_array($subresult)) {;
    $sql3=”SELECT * FROM “.$sp.”comments WHERE
    entry_id=”.$array['id'];
    $subsubresult = mysql_query($sql3,$dbi);
    while($sub$sql4=”INSERT INTO “.$wp.”comments VALUES
    (”,’”.$subarray['ID'].”‘,’”.$subsubarray['author'].”‘,’”.$subsubarray['email'].”‘,’”.$subsubarray['url'].”‘,’”.$subsubarra
    H:i:s”,$subsubarray['timestamp']).”‘,’”.date(“Y-m-d
    H:i:s”,$subsubarray['timestamp']).”‘,’”.$subsubarray['body'].”‘,”,’1′,”,”,”,”);”;
    subarray = mysql_fetch_array($subsubresult)) {;
    $megaresult = mysql_query($sql4,$dbi);
    }
    // Now me must update posts’ table to show comments in comments’ table
    $sql5=”UPDATE “.$wp.”posts SET “.$wp.”posts.comment_count=”.$array['comments'].” WHERE
    ID=”.$subarray['ID'].”;”;
    $megaresult = mysql_query($sql5,$dbi);
    }
    }

  3. adubi
    16 Jul ’06

    for some reason code has been missing… I will try to upload somewhere if you’re interested.

  4. Mike
    18 Jul ’06

    I’m interested in seeing the comments code. I’m getting ready to do the same migration. Does the one above work? If not could you email me the code?

  5. jozzua
    20 Jul ’06

    Hi Mike!
    Sorry, I’m not the one with comments code. You have to ask Adubi for this.

  6. Mike
    26 Jul ’06

    Ah yes. Good point. I’ll have to remember that for when I get ready.

    Thanks.

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