Next trick was to import my wordpress install. Importers all live in plugins, so while I was on the plugin page, I also activated the pingback plugin.

I apologize to everyone who received a ping from me while my posts were importing. Feel free to delete them.

The effort of pinging everything as it imported killed my import prematurely, so only there wasn't as much chaos as their could have been. Running the import again, sans pingbacks, worked fine, though. As I told Options, I won't be using habari to run archgfx at present, since i have some 30-odd pages that don't really behave yet, but at least I can hack about with the software for now.

1. In CPanel, under PHP Config, there's an "Install Master PHP.ini File" button

Sometime last year i started maintaining a separate geek blog, where i was posting all the geeky sort of stuff about wordpress. What started as a list of hacks turned into something resembling a real blog, mainly because people were paying attention to the geeky stuff. When i started, i wanted to focus on writing more architecture/design related posts here. As it turned out, it was easier to bang out 5 minute posts on a new hack, or a new gripe with wordpress. Since i've barely had time to even post in one blog, this blog's been a bit of a graveyard. To the point that i even started posting semi-design related things in the geek blog. So i'm giving up on the split.

However, i don't want to lose all the lovely traffic that wordpress.com has brought me in the last year. Naturally, it's not trivial to merge two blogs without breaking any links. but it's the steps aren't too bad one at a time:

1. buy domain mapping on wordpress.com. once it's been running for about a week, you can safely start the rest of the steps. the wp.com servers will start redirecting people from username.wordpress.com to username.yourdomain.com.
2. export your entries. make sure to delete spam before you do. this shrank the size of my *.WXR file to a fifth of what it was.
3. set up a subdomain with your host. most hosts do this fairly easily. bluehost definately made it a breeze. the process is going to be different for every host, though.
4. install wordpress in said subdomain, immediately. until you've got wordpress set up, people are going to see an empty directory listing for every entry.
5. import all your old entries into the subdomain blog.
6. change your permalink structure to "date and name based" to match wp.com permalinks.
7. install the Permalink Redirect plugin.
8. in the "Old Permalink Structure" field, paste in /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/, and check the "redirect hostname" box.
9. somewhere around here you should double check that any links to your wp.com blog are landing on your new subdomain blog.
10. import the same entries into the destination blog.
11. change the permalink structure of the subdomain blog to match the destination blog.
12. check that all the entries have similar url's. if you have posts in multiple categories, wordpress my change up the order on you. since my geek blog was pretty focused, i trimmed everything down to one category (with a whole lot of tags).
13. Last step: double check everything before you do this (expecially the checkbox on step 8): on the subdomain blog, in general options, change your Blog Address (URL) to the address of your destination blog.

That will make the permalink redirect plugin start sending everyone to your destination blog's URL, with the matching permalink structure.  The plugin only works for posts that exist, though.  it can't just make up category names (or whatever else is in your permalink structure).  As long as you don't change the WordPress Adress option, you should still be able to access the backend of your subdomain blog (should you want to make placeholder posts).

Anyway, i don't know how much use this is to anyone else, since most people have the good sense to not try to write two blogs at once, but there it is.

It's not that easyCGI has great email hosting. their webmail is workable at best (better, since the last upgrade). they only provide POP3, not IMAP email. The reason i wanted to switch back? BlueHost doesn't provide a catchall address. Apparently doing so would cripple their servers, because your email server is the same as your web server. and 'all that spam' would bring the server to its knees. i've posted about this in their forums, but apparently all that does is bring out the idiot fanboys saying 'your spam is everyone's problem'. no, bluehost's poorly configured servers are everyone's problem.

Having had a catchall email for archgfx.net for 4 years on 2 webhosts, this seems bizarre to me. there's no reason that one email couldn't receive more spam than all the uncreated addresses put together. This is exactly how my email is set up. i have specific junk addresses: crappy, crapmail, webmaster, sales, etc. They come from using throwaway email addresses to sign up for things, and from standard addresses that bots think will reach the site owner. They all route to a yahoo inbox that i can dumpster dive for registration emails if the need arises.

The rest of the email to archgfx lands in my main inbox. this includes emails to sunburntkamel, adam, afreetly, af, and other addresses that were either easier to pronounce over the phone, or that people have erroneously remembered. I can't possibly remember all of them, or attempt to generate all the possible misspellings and misrememberings of my name. so not having a catchall is a dealbreaker for me.

Back when it was first opened, i read derek's post, and signed up for gmail hosted. I found out then that i couldn't set up email aliases to non-archgfx.net addresses. at the time, that was a big enough pain for me to not bother using the service. now, having to keep two gmail windows open (one hosted, one standard) is less of an issue than losing mail that i've depended on arriving for 4 years. So i changed my MX records again, since hosted gmail beats the $3.95 a month for easyCGI.

I can't set up email aliases on hosted gmail, but i can forward email. so i have one junk box (crapmail), that forwards its contents to yahoo. the other 'big spam' addresses are aliased to that one. it works, more or less. i have to think it would be easier on google's servers for them to just let me alias to yahoo, but functionally, it's about the same. and i doubt google's servers are going to buckle under the strain.