Fixing and upgrading my site

Fixing and Upgrading My Site

As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been contemplating to fix my other site and upgrading it. I’ve been dreading it as I know it will not be a simple process and I’m the type that can be considered ‘technically challenged’ when it come to site mantainence. The old adage said… when it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But then, I know that the ‘real site’ was sitting in a wrong folder and using a redirect is not good for the long run.

So, yes… I took the plunge and set myself two missions to:

1) move the blog to the root directory 2) update the wordpress to the latest version

Moving the blog…

The first thing I did was to backup my files and folders and I use the ‘export’ function. In my thinking, it would be a breeze to just use a simple  ‘import’ feature within the wordpress later. Yup, I did not backup the full database… it was so stupid of me. Can you guess what happened next? Yes… I deleted the whole wordpress folder with0ut even checking if Wordpress 2.6 is still available for download. Double dumb there…

What happened next actually was pretty amazing learning experience for me and a steep one too! I went merrily to download the old wordpress from the site and the only that was available for download was the latest version. I was scared shit because I’d already deleted my whole folders and I cannot simply install the new wordpress because my ‘export’ files was in older version. It will not work. I frantically tried to download the original SEO blog software from Jeff’s website, but when I got to the download page, I could not find it.. all that was available there was the new SEO getting plugin that only works for WordPress 2.7. Damn it… I feel like crying because of my stupidity.

The next thing I did was searching through my hard disk to look for the original files. I was hoping that I still keep a copy of it and thank goodness I’ve still got it. That was my lifeline… I FTPed the whole folders to my site root, making sure I did not include the ‘wordpress folder’. Thankfully, the internet connection was very good yesterday and I managed to get everything uploaded in a short time. After everything was loaded, I went it to find the login page… yup, jeff’s team make it simple so that all it required was  ’a few clicks install’. I got passed the login page, then come the next error.. ’there is already wordpress table/database available’ .. something like that.. .I said what the heck… so I googled and found that it was because of my old wordpress intallation, a wordpress table/database .. pardon my terms.. I cannot create a new one and I have to ’dump‘ or ‘delete’ the table so that a new one can be created. Oo..oo…I don’t know what it meant so I googled again..this time ‘how to dump/delete wordpress table/database from cpanel’ ..all I can do was working from cpanel because I cannot log in to my wordpress and cannot start a new installation also…I found out that we can use phpMyadmin to do this..choose the database that we want to dump and just click ‘dump’.. and after that I can install my wordpress … phewwww

Upgrading to the latest wordpress..

I imported my site and set about to upgrade it to the latest wordpress… I did it manually…I downloaded and activated all the plugins and found that my files are there but all my previous permalink no longer works .. and keep getting error 404 when I clicked on them. When I googled it, I found that it has something to do with the permalink structure and I choose to change it to  /%postname%/ and finally it works… well, not after I did some fiddling trying to fix another error with the htcaccess file etc. One problem fixed….

So, now my links and posts are working.. After enabling all the plugins, fixing the permalinks setting, creating the sitemap and some other general settings I went to googled my site and to my horror, I get another 404 error. This time is due to the ‘wordpress’ folder was no longer available. I searched again for some information about doing a redirect.. I tried to do it from my cpanel but it seems to be not working properly. All I wanted was to have the 404 errror redirects to my main page automatically but I cannot do it.

Finally, I found that I can put some code inside my error.php file so that it can refresh to my main site if the viewer click on the link that no longer there. Yup, it works.. finally.. by the way.. I don’t know what went wrong but I cannot get my plugins from the menu within my wordpress 2.7.. so I have to upload  it manually.. .other than that… my other site is up and running healthily now. I even installed Jeff’s new SEO traffic getting plugin and it has a ‘meter’ to show what is the percentage of efforts I put into pulling the traffic…it suggested some plugins for me to install also. And all I need now is constantly updating the site with new posts.. 

When I googled my site keyword today, it is on the first page of Google    .. Number 2… I’m proud of my efforts to fix it … and what do I think of all that experiences? Priceless..  I can choose to slump and moan when everythings when wrong but I determine and focus to fix the mess and I did it!! … with the help of good old Google…

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