After two years of my last migration from blogspot to wordpress, Here I am, after 3 years of blogging, migrated to third service. This time, moving out of self-hosted wordpress to a nice hosted solution Tumblr. You might haven’t seen many differences other than theme becoming extremely minimalistic.

Well, there are the changes.

1. Now, the service is no longer wordpress, its Tumblr :D
2. All posts are migrated
3. All comments are migrated to Disqus, a very good global comment system
4. URLs of all posts are changed, but any time you can you use the search
5. All bookmarks, external links, google indexed pages till re-indexing are broken. Boo Hoo.

Migration went smooth, but there was a small problem for doing the same. There were no softwares available to do the same. “Migration from Wordpress to Tumblr”. If any existed, they will certainly miss migrating the comments or the attachments you’ve done in your previous wordpress blog. And, it of course is a tedious task to migrate everything if you do that manually.

So, on my way here, I wrote a small script for doing the same - Wordpress to Tumblr migration. I called it Wp2Tumblr.Py

Well, it does the following things -

1. Takes your wordpress extended rss archive and parses it
2. Post all your wordpress posts to Tumblr
3. While doing above step, it posts all your image uploads to Tumblr as Private post, extract the url of the image from Tumblr post, change the same in  your wordpress post.
4. Migrate all the comments of the post to your disqus account and link them to your post

Well, as I promised, I’m going to release all my personal code as opensource under WTFPL. So, if you’ve a similar requirement, you can clone the repo from http://github.com/karteek/wp2tumblr.py

By the way, I didn’t tell you whats better in Tumblr than Wordpress yet. These are few I found as new

• Totally customizable themes. Of course, you can do same on self-hosted versions of wordpress. Paid feature on wordpress.com, I guess.
• Multiple of types of posts. Unnecessary in my opinion, but what the hell.
• Custom domain support. Self hosted wordpress, obvious. wordpress.com, its a paid feature.

Above all, the main reason, I wanted to move to a hosted service. Blogger is too messy. Comment system sucks there. Wordpress is nice, but I couldn’t get username ‘karteek’ and custom domains are not part of standard feature set and I was feeling all excited for an adventure :p

I still think that Wordpress is the best blogging software available, but updating the codebase, payment to the hosting provider etc etc are few things you really are not supposed to be worrying about when you blog for fun. Tumblr made life easy, without losing my identity - karteek.selfdabba.com. All I had to do is point my subdomain’s A record to Tumblr’s server.

Wordpress guys have released another great version of Wordpress codenamed ‘Coltrane’. I’ve just upgraded to it. I loved the dashboard as well as new features. Most of the things for which I had to use plugins are now part of the core package. But, it broke my previous theme, so I had to switch to another theme ‘iNove’. Looks cool eh ? ;) 

In fewer words its a ‘Must-have Upgrade’.

Old host is having issues with cPanel and Apache. cPanel is removing the entry for my domain some how from the httpd.conf file again and again. So, I moved (just the blog - karteek.selfdabba.com) to the new host.

I’m thinking about maintaining a mirror at http://karteek.mondayphobia.com which will reside on the old host. Need to take a look at xmlrpc of wordpress to do that. Guys, if you know any plugins that do mirroring, let me know before I start dirtying my hands with the code :D

I’ve spent another Satyam Cinemas ticket for hosting, this time, to a host which got older-but-stable versions of softwares. I’ve migrated database to this new one as well. Guess what, this time, I’m trying yet-another-new-thing. Now, I’ve two hosting packages on two different hosts (didn’t waste much money, total cost is three tickets at Satyam Cinemas). My DNS management is done for free by ZoneEdit and it supports Round-robin DNS (A technique that enables a domain to be hosted on multiple servers, and to have the load balanced between them) So, I configured both servers to have my blog and one of the will be pointed by ZoneEdit’s DNS Servers when you request. Reasons for this action

• I’ve no clue why I did this :)
• Let me see if I get to learn something new as I got so many new doubts right now while doing it
• First host is bad, I don’t know about second host. Atleast one of them will up to serve the blog :P

I’ve no clue for following questions

• How am I going to synchronize posts at both the servers ?
• Will DNS server point you to the second server automatically when the first server is down ?
• What exactly will be happening in the background at DNS server and my browser when I request a page ?

I’m sure that I’ll get more doubts and I’m more sure that I’m going to find answers for these questions. If you’ve answers for my questions, please let me know, otherwise, I will let you guys know when I find solutions :)

No need to explain, I found a great wordpress theme named iTheme from N Design Studio (Check footer for more details). Now, you are looking at it. I modified a bit of code and CSS as well. Created a sitemap XML, which is at its default location.

By the way, I inspired a friend of mine to blog today !!! He read my blog and found that there is no need for “substance” to blog and one can blog ANY crap. That’s all for now. Any comments on the looks ?