real blogging tips

I have been meaning to write this post for a while and am sorry for the delay. I know a few of you were thinking of moving to a new domain name at some point soon.

As most of you know, I recently took over this blog from the much missed Benjamin Patton. During the move we decided that it would be a good idea to also move the blog over to a more suitable domain.

So whilst moving hosts I also had to move the domain name from http://benjaminpatton.com to http://realbloggingtips.com. Two other domains also had 301 redirects pointing to http://benjaminpatton.com.

I had never actually changed a domain name before so I had a little learning to do. However in the end it really was not very hard and if you follow my steps I can’t se it being hard for you either.

This guide assumes you are using cpanel. However if you are not just ask me what you need to know and I will help you with the move.

If you have read my post that dealt solely with moving a wordpress blog “8 Easy Steps to Move A Wordpress Blog” then will be familiar with most of the processes needed.

Backing Up The Files To Move

1. Backup Your Files.
Either use the backup option in cpanel to make a backup of your home directory or simply copy your home directory to a safe place using ftp access.

2. Backup Your Database.
On Your cpanel dashboard you will see an icon called “MySQL databases” Click this icon and find the link for “phpMyAdmin“. The screen that will load can e seen FIG 1 below.
Now on the left hand side select the database associated with your wordpress install. In many cases this will be “username_wrdp1″ or similar. Click the export button in the main window. Then make sure you have the “Save as file” button checked and click “Go”. You will be prompted to save your database to your computer. Put it in a safe place with your home directory backup.

FIG 1: phpMyAdmin, important areas circled in Red.

Setting Up The New Hosting and Installing A Fresh Copy Of Wordpress

3. Set Up The New Hosting Account / Area.
I already owned a fantastic Reseller account from Hostgator, whom I highly recommend. So I set up a new account for http://realbloggingtips.com and pointed the name servers to the nameservers provided when I set up the hosting.

4. Install Wordpress Via Cpanel.
One of the great thing about cpanel is Fantastico Deluxe. You will see the icon on your cpanel dashboard. Click that icon and you have access to push button installation of a great range of scripts. In this case install Wordpress. Just click the icon and fil in the details. Don’t worry about any of the user names or anything as these will be reverting back to your original user and password once we have the move complete.

Moving The Files And Database Over To The New Domain Hosting And Resolving Database Issues.

5. Move the files Over.
Open the ftp to your new Hosting. I use a program called Filezilla for ftp. You will see the files that have been installed with the wordpress install in the home directory. Open your home directory backup and find the “wp-content” folder. Copy this folder over to the hosting account and overwrite the one that fantastico installed, your wordpress themes, plugins and upload images are now in place.
Also find any non wordpress files in your home directory backup and copy them onto the new hosting. Make sure they go into the same place that they were in on the old hosting. By non wordpress files I mean things like addtional banner images, stored files and ebooks you provide for download etc etc.

6. Reinstate the Database.
When Fantastico installed Wordpress on the new hosting it already created a new database for you. All we have to do now is put the information from the old database into this.
(See Fig 1 for visual reference) Login to the new hostings PHP My Admin. Click on the wordpress database on the left. At the bottom of the main window select “Check All”, then select “Drop” from the drop down menu. This will empty the database. Now Click the “Import” tab at the top of the main window. Import your saved database from the old hosting.

7. Fix URL Issues In The Database.
This is the important part about moving to a new Domain name. The old database currently references the old domain name so we have to do some MySQL wizardry to make this all point to the new domain. This bit looks difficult But I will try and explain it as easy as possible.

This trick came from an excellent post over at My Digital Life

The lines of code below are MySQL commands which will change things thrings referenced througout your whole database.

To run each of these commands you need to be logged into “phpMyAdmin“. Select your wordpress database on the left and click the SQL tab in the main window. FIG 2 shows the window that you should have. These commands should be entered in the indicated area and then you just will just the Go button.

Fig 2: phpMyAdin SQL Command Area

This first command tells the database to update the wordpress blog with the new URL. Ok, so run the first command making sure that you replace the domains with the relevent old and new info from your domains. Make sure you get the www’s right (if you use them or not).

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

This second command resoves the URLs of all your wordpress posts and pages.

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.old-domain.com','http://www.new-domain.com');

This third command various links that may be used around your blog in posts pages and other places controlled by the database. Run this command making sure you replace the old and new domain parts:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com');

Now the blog should be all moved over and working well. Just take a look through and then login to wordpress (your old login details will be reinstated again now) to check everything out. Sometimes you may need to reset the permalinks to deafult and then back to the pretty URLs.

If anything isn’t working right. Drop the entries from the database and reimport the backup.

301 Redirecting The Old Domains.

8. Setting Up A Redirect.
Luckily my domains were hosted with GoDaddy. Most good hosts these days will provide domain level 301 redirecting within their domain managment. 301 redirecting basically tells Google and other search engines that the blog and all posts/pages have been permantly moved to a new location. This should pass on most link juice and hopefully hold your Page Rank and link numbers. Plus all your old readers will find their way to your new domain. My Page Rank has actually dropped from 3 to 2 since the domain move. Below is a screen shot of the Godaddy 301 redirecting area.

Feedburner, Mailinglists and Other Issues.

Sadly Feedburner lets you change the URL that it gets the extension name of the Feed from but not the name of the feed itself. So sadly my feed still says Big Ben Patton’s Blog…. I am trying thinnk of a fix for this! The URL Can be changed by looging into your feedburner account, selecting the feed and then going to Edit Feed Details.

IF you have a mailing list. Depending on the software, login and change any settings that are needed. It may also be wise to inform the readers of the domain shift.

Update all your social bookmarking links…. I still have not done this.

Then one of the final steps is making sure that you update the graphics and theme. Again, I am trying to find the time to sit down and create a perfect resdesign for this place.

That’s just about it. It seems like a lot but that is because I wanted to be detailed. If you are careful and keep backups the whole process is easy.

Any questions fire away. Thanks for reading…. The next post will be a little lighter reading