Hontounia Einigung Stage Zwei

After the initial relief that the new blog, domain and my computer have not exploded (like Reiji's apartment), it was time to get into the nitty gritties and tweaking needed to bring Hontou Ni up to full functionality (where's Cal when you need her?).

This post reports on my experience compared against the list provided by Kabitzin's trusty blog absorption guide:

Prep Work. I didn't do any of this (other than backing up just in case) because I was melding the two export files into a new blog rather than fiddling with an existing one; if it failed, I could just delete the whole thing and try again (or not).

The Crime. I duly downloaded the WXR export files (in .xml format) for both blogs to be merged. The first big problem began when the import menu refused to accept either file because "Sorry, there has been an error. The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini" (2MB).

I couldn't hack my php.ini to change the file limit and the gzip trick failed too so I had to manually split up the export file into multiple pieces (via the method specified here) and upload them one by one. This took me about two and a half hours to do, experiencing the joy of copying and pasting what got captured after pressing down the shift and page down keys for about 135 seconds a time. And then waiting on tenderhooks to see if the ridiculously weak upload of my connection managed to get a file through without any interruption or corruption.

My other gripes about the export/import experience was (1) the nesting for my comments disappeared, (2) I had to reconvert my SQL tables from Latin/Swedish into UTF8 again though it might be an issue with my Fantastico installer but I'm still suspecting that the export file didn't carry over Chinese/Japanese characters (160 posts to clean up) and the conversion process has truncated some of my posts especially those with the é letter, (3) categories that I thought I had deleted yonks ago reappeared and had to be manually deleted (again), (4) the link categories did not seem to make it through the import process (I probably should have saved the output as .opml instead of .php).

As this was an intra-domain shift, I could save some time (particularly for the huge number of screencaps from sou omou?) and not have to use the Download Attachments as all the img src HTML could still point to their old URLs. In any case, I've decided to post just a few screencaps per post in the future so I'll be using the WP media uploader from now on instead of FTP.

Cleaning Up. This was the part I was most anxious about but the Search and Replace plugin worked a treat; links within my posts, comments and even email author particulars were swiftly dispatched without any problems. For posts that came from my old blog, I just replaced /souomou with /zan; likewise, a similar substitution worked for /taihendesu posts even though they used the default /?p=number permalink structure.

Bribing the Officials. Another worry had been how well the two different permalink structures (I used and also continue to use /year/month/day/post-name) would gel together. Also relieved that taihendesu posts continued to work after the search and replace and permalink structure change with /zan/?p=number links from old posts from the import redirecting nicely to /year/month/day/post-name.

It took me a while to get the hang of the Redirection plugin's Regular Expressions (Regex) but I finally figured out that, for hontou ni sou omou?, the source URL needed was /souomou/(\d*)/(\d*)/(\d*)/(.*) and target URL being /zan/$1/$2/$3/$4 (after reading this useful guide) but I was completely defeated when trying to redirect Hontou ni Taihen desu's entries based on /?p=number, trying (and failing with) source URL /taihendesu/?p=(\d*) or /?p=d+ mapping onto /zan/?p=$1. In the end, I just changed taihendesu's permalink settings to /year/month/day/post-name and used the same regex employed for souomou, given that since WP 2.1, old slugs should redirect even if the permalink structure was changed. It's cumbersome, a two step process but it seems to work.

Haven't redirected feeds (particularly for animenano and ab antenna) yet as I have to sign up for Feedburner.

Also so happy that I could just transfer my files from the child theme files for Vigilance and drop them straight into the new blogs and voila!

Related posts:

1. Hontounia Einigung Stage Ein
2. Mai Otome Zwei 2
3. Mai Otome Zwei 4