www.copyandwaste.com

I moved from my previous IIS/Subtext platform to the old LAMP/wordpress standby.  There are a few reasons why I didn’t like subtext, it sucked.  I left the wordpress world and I just came back, and the changes are awesome!

Subtext chokes on exporting to BlogML if any posts contain embedded youtube videos, so I removed them from my post(s).

Migration steps:

1. Recursive ftp get from old host (grabbed all the files and directories)
2. Wrote down all the links to posts that I had
3. Exported subtext blog to ml file and saved to local machine
4. Changed nameservers at my registrar (directnic.com)
5. Used Fantastico to setup wordpress instance for www.copyandwaste.com
6. Configured Wordpress settings to my liking
7. Downloaded and installed BlogML import plugin, instructions here
8. Imported BlogML file to wordpress
9. FTP put for my images directory on my new host
10. Wrote edited .htaccess for my site’s root and inserted RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^.]+)\.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/$2/$3/$4/$5 [R=301,L]
11. Fixed some dates for posts using mysql cli

“Pretty URIs” in subtext look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/archive/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post.aspx

“Pretty URIs” in wordpress look like this:

http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/07/29/building-a-mouse-picture-post/

As you see, all I had to do was remove the “archive” part.. right?  Wrong.  Subtext allows periods in the URI, therefore I ended up writing 3 more rewrite rules:

RewriteRUle ^archive/2008/05/26/alix-2c.3-openbsd-4.3.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/05/26/alix-2c3-openbsd-43/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^archive/2008/06/23/blueboss-v2.0---bluetooth-proximity-alerting.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/06/23/blueboss-v20-bluetooth-proximity-alerting/ [R=301,L]

RewriteRule ^archive/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethods.ftp.listdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory.aspx http://www.copyandwaste.com/2007/12/25/parsing-webrequestmethodsftplistdirectorydetails-and-listdirectory/ [R=301,L]

The RSS URI in Subtext looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/rss.aspx

The RSS URI in Wordpress looks like: http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed

So yet an other RewriteRule:

RewriteRule ^rss.aspx$ http://www.copyandwaste.com/feed/ [R=301,L]

And that’s it! (Hopefully)

If I were to do this again, I would probably just create my own custom string for permalinks, which would cut about have my mod_rewrite use.  Unfortunately, creating my own custom string for permalinks wouldn’t fix the periods in the URI problem.