twoplustwoequalsblog

or, “Yet another reason why I changed webhosts.”

If you’re reading this before Thanksgiving, you have magical Internet powers. Twoplustwoequalsfive.com still doesn’t point here, so I have no idea how you found this. The reason it’s hidden is because my old webhost is being slow about relinquishing our domain name.

Part of moving web hosts is transfering your SQL Database information. The database holds all the posts, comments, settings, etc that make up a web blog. On my old page, I was using a blogging script called pMachine. This worked quite well for a year. However, when I went to export-import the SQL on to the new server, the SQL that was being exported by the old server was not valid SQL. This meant when I went to import it, it didn’t work. The problem lay with not enclosing text fields with single quotes. I would have had to manually rebuild hundreds of KB of SQL.

Luckily, Chris had a stroke of genius. He knew of a pMachine to Wordpress importer. So I installed Wordpress on the old site, and imported the pMachine data into it perfectly. Then I just had to get the Wordpress data back off, for which I used a Wordpress backup tool. I thought the import wasn’t working, but I was using the wrong .sql file. A bit of SQL hacking and database tweaking later, I had all my old entries on my new blog.

Total time elapsed: 4 hours.