Changing the location of a WordPress installation isn’t as harrowing as it may sound. Although no tools exist to do it automatically, some knowledge of the Linux command line and MySQL makes it do-able. This post is a summary of the steps I performed to relocate my blog folder; this assumes you are hosting under Linux, MySQL, and cPanel. Take a gander at the official Moving WordPress documentation before you begin.

Make a Backup

Be sure to make a backup of your installation.

Change the Current Blog Folder

Rename your existing WordPress folder (i.e.: /journal) to the new name. FTP or ssh (i.e.: mv journal blog) can be used for this.

Update the blog path settings within the admin panel.

Updating Paths in the Database

If your blog posts contain images or links using the old folder they must be changed. There is a simple SQL command which performs a search and replace. I suggest using phpMyAdmin instead of MySQL’s command line.

Take a look at your wp_options table in phpMyAdmin. You may find that plug-ins are using your old path in their settings which may be not accessible through the admin interface.

Don’t Break Trackbacks

If anyone is linking to your blog they’ll be using the old folder name. To ensure those links don’t break with your folder we can use a symbolic link and a 301 redirect.

Login to your Linux hosting account using ssh and navigate to the root folder of your web site such as public_html. Enter the following command:

ln -s /path/to/new /path/to/old

Replace /path/to/new and /path/to/old with the absolute folder names. For example:

ln -s /home/your-domain/www/blog /home/your-domain/www/journal

You may be tempted to add a redirect using cPanel but don’t - the symlink above is doing this for you.

Unfortunately, permalinks still won’t work. For example, a permalink of http://your-blog/journal/2008/06/my-post will generate a 404 Not Found instead of redirecting to http://your-blog/blog/2008/06/my-post. Don’t bother with the Redirection plug-in because it doesn’t build a library of prior permalinks.

Instead, use Alexandra’s technique to modify your .htaccess file and all of your old permalinks will 301 properly.

It’s said that history repeats itself every twenty years, especially with fashion or music. Twenty-plus years ago computers were manipulated using text commands at the command prompt of DOS or UNIX.

Macintosh and Windows ushered in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and made the command line near obsolete except for the most technical of users. I’ve thought back to the old days of the C: prompt and the relative simplicity of getting things done. To compare with conventional English grammar, an action verb, adjective, and subject was all that was necessary.

find "milk" *.txt
dir /s todolist.txt

Modern GUIs provide shortcut keys like Ctrl-S to save and Cmd-P to print but that’s all. What if we could do just a little more? A blending of old-school command line with the GUI.

According to BetaNews, Mozilla is experimenting with Ubiquity, software to provide command line functionality within their browser software. It’s akin to what QuickSilver can be made to do but intrinsic to the host application. Whether Ubiquity is an improvement to QuickSilver is yet to be realized but it’s an interesting effort for advanced users.

Ubiquity is available as a free download for Firefox.

Digital Heaven’s VideoSpace widget, a disk storage calculator for video footage, has a new home on the ‘net: http://www.videospaceonline.com/. Use it anywhere your browser and iPhone can reach.

Lately I’ve been using some old PCs. Pentium 3 and 4 based machines with 256 MB of RAM running Windows XP. They’re not as slow as you’d think: Word and Excel run fine. Even PowerPoint is snappy enough.

What really, really, hobbles these boxes isn’t bloatware like Office, it’s Web 2.0 applications. Using Firefox or Internet Explorer, sites like Gmail and MobileMe grind the computer to a halt. That’s not all…any site utilizing JavaScript makes surfing the web a slow, painful process.

Years ago the IT industry was touting the Internet Appliance which was a low-powered computer using a web browser as the conduit to running web-based software. Those devices in their desktop format didn’t take off and I’m not sure they would have survived based on my observations of the WWW on a Pentium 3 and 4 computer.

Over the years we have blamed Microsoft Office for driving up the speed and memory requirements of a personal computer. When Office 2003 runs acceptably on a 600 MHz Pentium 3 and Gmail does not, it’s time to start questioning the computing resources required to surf the web.

JavaScript may be the culprit and there’s no getting away from it with today’s web.

A short while ago I was researching an alternative to on-line backup because Mozy hasn’t been reliable for me. Just after signing up for an Amazon S3 account I clicked a link to return to the home page and was greeted with this fine error message:

Same result on another computer and my mobile phone. It’s not every day you get to witness a giant web site down and out.