Converting (back) to wordpress from Blogger
For a long time I ran a blog called tech.buraglio.com that was a self hosted wordpress site. After having kids and getting a bit busier at work, I decided to move everything that I had been hosting (images, scripts, hacks, blogs and DNS) to “the cloud”. I managed to do this for everything but my primary DNS resolver, which I had always intended to keep, and one wordpress blog that I hosted for someone else.
Since I already had apache working and serving other stuff, and one of them is another WP site, I already has MySQL running. I just enabled SSL for the new domain that I had added and was ready to go. I’m a really lazy sysadmin, so I used this as a reference.
First, installing wordpress. I chose the SVN install for easier upgrades down the road. Upgrading WP was somethingI alweays hated doing, so I let it languish when I used it before. At least now I should, in most cases, be able to just type “svn update” to get it up to date (after verifying a back up, of course).
After using the blogger importer, I had to go through and set all of my old blogger drafts to draft status again, wordpress has changed them all to published status. A minor detail. the rest should be pretty straight forward, right? Maybe not. I’ve done a lot of twitter and bit.ly linking to my posts and I had a feedburner and quite a few RSS subscribers. The feedburner stuff I’m probably going to have to write off. The link needed to be more obvious as to what it was. The biggest thing I have to worry about is that Blogger formats it’s “pretty” links in a different way than wordpress. Thankfully, however, I’m self gosting so I can use apache magic to fix this.
.htaccess to the rescue.
For every post, I’ve had to create a redirect entry in my .htaccess file. Most of it is done, but for reference, here is what it looks like:
Redirect 301 /2012/11/sdn-across-domains-in-wan-novice-look.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/sdn-across-domains-in-the-wan-a-novice-look/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/and-purple-pony.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/sdn-across-domains-in-the-wan-a-novice-look/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/using-brocade-mlxe-as-replicator-to-ids.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/using-a-brocade-mlxe-as-a-replicator-to-an-ids/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/workflow-and-my-every-day-workstation.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/workflow-and-my-every-day-workstation-setup/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/vdxrancid-contrib-scripts.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/vdxrancid-contrib-scripts/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/scinet-privileged-few.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/scinet-a-privileged-few/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/juniper-ex-4200-arp-ndp-problem-or.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/juniper-ex-4200-arp-ndp-problem-or-things-id-like-to-see-in-a-tac/
Redirect 301 /2012/11/and-purple-pony.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/11/and-a-purple-pony/
Redirect 301 /2012/10/directionality_31.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/10/directionality/
Redirect 301 /2012/10/juniper-to-ios-conversion-chart.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/10/juniper-to-ios-conversion-chart/
Redirect 301 /2012/10/host-based-sflow-or-sflow-for-more-than.html http://www.forwardingplane.net/2012/10/host-based-sflow-or-sflow-for-more-than-just-network-traffic/
….and so on.
I got really used to the google analytics, so I had to add a plugin for that. I chose Google Analyticator. ….Then I realized that users having to create accounts is lame, so I added Social Connect.
So far, that’s pretty much it. However, since this is a public unix box I need to make sure it’s relatively safe, so I would highly recommend installing sshguard in addition to whatever other firewall rules it can dynamically block offensive hosts and then unblock them after a period of time. I am also a big fan of duo security for two factor auth.
We’ll see how this goes……