Unruled Notebook

Its been a while since arunnnarasimhan moved to its own domain. This post is to answer two related questions from readers and friends.

1) Why have a domain and pay for it, while a million free blog offering sites are available?

My perceived advantages

1. Freedom. I am recalcitrant and learn more if left to myself. I need to slosh and gulp and gasp for breath to learn my swimming. And in the process if I get to die, so be it. So much so that a free blog site is a dent in my bloatocratic ego.
2. Learning. Web page development I learnt by trial and (more) error. So did I about blogging and related software, including PHP and MySQL. So when I registered my domain an year back, I did it with a conscious motive of learning as an avocation all of these stuff. The science blog grew more as a side effect.
3. Control. Your own domain gives you more of this. Instead of the user interface (dashboard) alone, you get to see and use the back end (actual files and database). This helps at times of trouble…
4. …and it seems having your own domain and blog saves you from getting caught in the generic blog blackouts that happen whimsically in democratic India.

I should add to this that, contrary to perceived belief among some bloggers, hosting and domain charges are not that expensive. If un povero professore like me can do it, why not others?

There should be many other advantages that could be cited, which I leave for the appropriate readers to fill in the comments.

2) How to move wordpress blog from own domain to another?

Again, there are perhaps more than a GB of free information online (and growing everyday) about how to do this. My megalomaniac take on this is of course, don’t bother to read all of the detailed steps given here there and everywhere on how to do this and how things could go wrong. Things will go wrong anyway and even after following all of the instructions to the tee.

Advice1: Find your own (better) way of doing the move.

Advice 2: The way that worked for me in a matter of minutes is to

• simply download the entire database from the old domain,
• open it as a text file in say, wordpad and
• by using the “find and replace” option change the instances of old address (in my case, http://arunnnarasimhan.wordpress.com) to the new domain address (http://arunnnarasimhan.wordpress.com) and
• save the file
• upload this file as the new database in the new domain
• Of course, wordpress needs to be installed successfully at the new domain before taking the above steps.
• Finally, copy the entire contents of the “wp-content” folder from the old blog to the new one. This folder would contain themes, plugins, uploads etc.

Now I am pitching for a dedicated server for arunnnarasimhan DOT Info with my hosting service. Will share the easier way on how to do this, once I learn it by doing all the mistakes.

And finally, the disclaimer (what with there are humans here who put their cat in the microwave and chose to sue the manufacturer because specific instructions to the contrary hasn’t been provided…):

I may be wrong in all of the above so don’t take my word for it. Try the above suggestions at you own risk.

Meanwhile, off to post some representative stuff for the blog…

Tags: wordpress, own domain, dreamhost, web hosting, moving wordpress blogs