Having just used the automatic upgrade (a new feature, introduced with WordPress 2.7 I believe) to upgrade the blog to 2.7.1 it was still a little slow. Installing Google Gears didn’t seem to make much difference.

Following Donncha on Twitter I regularly see him mention WP Super Cache, a plugin for WordPress to help speed page load times.

Again using a new feature for 2.7 I went and located the plugin through the WordPress dashboard, and did an automatic install. Activating the plugin I clicked through to re-load the homepage. My god! Such a difference in page load time it is unbelievable. Much more like I would expect from a modern web site.

Of course, the plugin is actually designed to help your blog survive the amount of traffic it might receive when it gets Dugg, Slashdotted or similar. Hey, it’s sped my blog up so I am a happy bunny.

Sluggish to lightning in one easy step! Many thanks for the plugin Donncha, I just wish I had installed it much much earlier.

I went back and had a look at June and July of 2005, just after I had switched to WP:

Funnily enough I was using “yeah baby” in posts then too…

The initial impression [of WordPress]is “Damn! This is some hot shit!” Yep I like it. It’s easier to maintain, and blog to. I still have a few functions that I have to figure out, but I’ll think WP is here to stay. Fear not, the old site, along with all the crappy posts by me and the cool stuff by Tony is still around. You can find it Here and linked in the blogroll on the right hand side. If I can ever be bothered I will look into converting the old pMachine posts into WP.

Yes, I still believe that WP is some hot shit and no, I never did figure out the pMachine posts. They’re long gone.

The other post that caught my eye was about a Google Search I ran:

In a moment of boredom I decided to search for a particular blog on Google. Failing miserably to find what I was looking for I did the dumbest thing ever and just typed “blog” into the search box and whacked my enter key hard enough to push it through the desk. The result? 128,000,000 entries returned.

That was 128 Million. For the hell of it I re-ran the search.

The result this time is 2.19 BILLION results.

It’s just unfortunate that Blogger is the number one result rather than wordpress.com. It’s no surprise though, Google owns Blogger and Blogger allows mutliple spam blogs with Google Adsense for the pathetic little loser with no job to earn a few cents a year. Ooh, that almost turned into a rant. Sorry!

Well, now I do have something to prove that I have been blogging that long (and longer!)

I spent most of this morning playing with Joomla! and Fireboard on the Fareham West Scouts Website which I am slowly filling with content for the district.  As my wife is down with an ear infection she has spent most of the day in bed.  Therefore, a good opportunity to play with WordPress.

I completed the upgrade as mentioned in my previous post and then remembered that somewhere I had that database backup from May.

To cut a tedious (and 4 hour long) story very short, I have managed to rebuild the WordPress database with 800 odd posts!  Here’s how:

1. Locate the old .sql download which was lurking somewhere on the “data” drive on the PC.
2. In a new database (in phpMyAdmin) upload said .sql file – check that everything you expect is there before going on further!
3. Create a subdomain and upload the WordPress core files – including re-creating the wp-config to connect to the new database
4. Reconfigure the “options” in the database to point to the new domain name and run the WP upgrade routine to bring the database to the 2.7 format.
5. Log into the dashboard on the new WP install and export all the data (posts, comments etc) in WXR (WordPress eXtended RSS) format.
6. Here’s where I ran into a problem.  My host, like many others has an upload limit of 2mb set.  This interferes with the upload of the WXR file.  I got round this by installing 7ZIP on my machine and compressing the WXR file into gzip (.gz) format[1. WordPress will accept the .gz upload and just work with it. The original file was 4.16mb and the gzipped file came out to 752kb.  If this doesn't work for you then you may have to figure out how to split the file.  I couldn't find any decent info on splitting but the 7zip option worked, thankfully!].
7. Upload the WXR file into the original install of WordPress and voila!  I have all my posts back.

Unfortunately they are missing any uploads and some links will almost definitely be broken, but it’s the text that’s important (I think!)

Final step is to remove the sub-domain and the files and database, unless you want to leave them there for a few days, which is exactly what I intend to do.

Right, I’m off to export the whole database and the WXR file and store them somewhere safe in case I cock it up again!

We’ll see! Not played with 2.7′s new dashboard yet, but like the “quickpress” option from the homepage of the dashboard