I haven’t been able to devote the amount of time that I would have liked to this over the last week, so there are still some things that I want to fix on the site, but the plunge has been taken, and everything moved over to johnonfood.com.

The first problem was to move some comments over from the original blog on wordpress.com to this one. There might be a clever way to do this, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a wordpress plugin that I couldn’t find, or I guess that you could probably go into the database and add the comments into the appopriate table there.

As there were only a small number of comments to move over, I just added them as new comments, copying and pasting the original text, and author info, then logged in as admin and edited the timestamps on each one to be the same as the original.

Once everything was in one place, it was time to move to the new domain (and a new server at the same time). I couldn’t use the wordpress export and import tools from the admin, for a couple of reasons.

• The wordpress import doesn’t the categories and posts with the same id number as the original database and the theme that this site runs on has some hard coded category numbers. I didn’t want to run through the theme files and change all of these instances.
• The export/import doesn’t seem to import category descriptions. You could just copy and paste them afterwords, but it would be much easier not to have to.
• It took quite a while to get everything setup just the way that I want it in the admin interface, including all of the plugin settings, and I didn’t want to do all of that again. There is no option for importing/exporting these settings.

After a bit of thought, it seemed much easier to do an SQL dump from the old database, and then edit the database itself and import the SQL into an empty database on the new server.

I used a text editor to find and replace each instance of the sites relative and absolute URLs in the SQL file, and then uploaded it and created a wp-config file pointing to the new DB, and voila, all posts, categores with descriptions and settings exactly where they should be.

I also edited the .htaccess file at the old address to redirect everything here with a 301 permanent redirect. This is vital if you want to retain search engine ranking and traffic when moving domains.