During my last redesign and site overhaul, I finally made the leap from WP 2.0 to 2.3. In the process of synchronizing data and removing unecessary plugins, I managed to replace several keyword- and meta-related plugins with the incredible All in One SEO Pack (AiOSEO). One of the plugins replaced by AiOSEO is Autometa, an otherwise very useful meta-keywords management tool.

Over the course of a year or so, Autometa had accumulated a significant number of meta keywords in its associated database table. Thus, to keep these keywords, I needed an effective way of transfering them from Autometa to AiOSEO. I definitely wanted to avoid having to manually re-enter the data.. — perhaps a direct database migration?

Fortunately, I am not the first person to blaze this trail, as I gladly discovered an excellent thread in the WordPress forums that provided the perfect solution. After successfully transferring my Autometa data into AiOSEO, I decided to share the technique in “official” tutorial format ;)

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My apologies for recent periods of site unavailability. Apparently, my hosting company is having a difficult time with the server that happens to host Perishable Press. As far as I can tell, the server problems began Wednesday morning (due to a “traffic spike”). By Thursday morning, Perishable Press (as well as a few of my other sites) had been down for a period exceeding eight nonconsecutive hours.

According to my log files, Thursday itself was even worse, with server uptime struggling at an embarrassing 78.7%. And, although Friday looked considerably better, the site continues to experience periods of downtime that inspire me to begin (once again) the arduous process of switching to a more reliable host..

Currently, the site is up, but only after a lengthy period of downtime earlier this morning. I figured I had better post an explanation while I had the chance.. who knows when stability will be restored. To be fair, up until Wednesday, my hosting provider has delivered reliable, consistent uptime. I sure hope they get back into the groove.

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Announcing an easy way to export and automatically format your WordPress Blogroll for import into your del.icio.us social bookmarking account!

The Export Blogroll plugin for del.icio.us simplifies the process of transferring your WordPress Blogroll to your del.icio.us account. del.icio.us now provides a way to import multiple links with a single file, however the file must emulate a specific (browser bookmark) format. The Export Blogroll plugin automatically formats your exported Blogroll content according to del.icio.us batch-upload specifications, making it super-easy to import and share your links. The Export Blogroll for del.icio.us plugin provides several export options:

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After our recent WordPress-2.1 blogroll debacle, we concluded that the WordPress Links Manager (aka the Blogroll) is no longer a viable, long-term solution for managing bookmark collections containing large numbers of links. A far better solution, in the eyes of many savvy web users, is the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Using del.icio.us for over a year now, we have found it to be highly flexible, always reliable, and infinitely extensible. Plus, as a social bookmark service, everyone benefits from everyone and quality resources are much easier to find. The dec.isio.n to switching from the Blogroll to del.icio.us is, in our opinion, a no-brainer.

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Several months ago, we encountered some problems with our hosting company and decided to switch servers. Then, after spending countless hours transferring our army of domains, the new server crashed and our databases were deleted. Further, after the transfer we quickly realized the inferior technological quality of our new host. Thus disgusted, we transferred everything back to our old server and hoped for the best.

For the past several months since then, our original server has been running as well as could be expected, all things considered. All functions were running smooth, the error logs were empty, and all was well and good in cyberspace. Then, suddenly, about two weeks ago, someone gained access and indiscriminately hacked every index file on the server. Expectedly, this created chaos, crashed websites, and left our hard-working server techs scrambling to fix the hole and secure the server.

Immediately after the attack, we began repairing our websites, uploading files, restoring databases, and troubleshooting errors. Then, just as we began to make some progress, the entire server crashed, wiping out all traces of every domain on the server. Deluged with "help tickets" from many customers, our hosting company responded with a form letter indicating the problem and reaffirming us of their support (copied verbatim):

Dear Velued Customer,

today we have experienced 4 hours of downtime due to broken cPanel/RHEL update. Everyday we receive updates from cPanel and RedHat, they are automatically installed on the server. Those are critical patches, software updates etc. Today's nightly upgreade broken whole server due to incompatibility in Bind (Name servers) library. All techs have been working on the issue, it took us some time to locate the problem. In the meantime we find out that more hosting companies has such problems. Finally we were able to fix the issue and the servers are back to normal. If you experience any problems accessing your domain names it may be because you tried to access the server when DNS was down and your local ISPs DNS server couldn't cache the IP address. It may take few hours until your local ISP's DNS server refresh the DNS zone.

You can check that your web site is up and working properly through 3rd party proxy server ie. www.the-cloak.com

The issue affected ALL hosting companies which uses cPanel, for more information regarding the issue please check cPanel forums at:

http://forums[…].com (edited)

We understand your frustration and how it harmed your business however we would like to assure you that we are here 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and if there is anything wrong we will do our best to fix the issue as soon as possible.

Please accept our appology and we hope to offer you best hosting services possible.

Best regards,
Customer Service Manager

Apparently, during the process of cleaning up the aftermath of the server attack, it became necessary to upgrade various components of cPanel and other server software. Unfortunately, the upgrade produced conflicts and subsequently crashed the entire system. Ahhh yeah. Thanks for that form letter.

Several days later, after great stress and concern, the domains were once again online and accessible, enabling customers access to (once again) begin work on the restoration process. Things were finally looking up..

Well almost. After all of our websites had been restored and the dust had settled, several key applications were no longer functional. After an unsuccessful troubleshooting session, we broke down and submitted a help ticket. As it turns out, two vital PHP functions, passthru() and exec(), had been disabled due to security concerns. In other words, thanks to the cracking exploits some mindless showoff, the generous scripting privileges customers once enjoyed have now been restricted.

The good news is that, aside from the loss of a few key functions, everything else is once again up and running considerably well. Looking back, we see how the difficult, stressful, even frustrating events serve as priceless learning experiences. Indeed, managing websites is definitely a challenging endeavour, requiring great patience, flexibility, and determination.

The overly dramatic process of transferring our Online Empire to a new server and then back again manifests several valuable lessons. Please look back your note and observe the following suggestions during any future server migration and/or domain propagation events…

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After successfully migrating our domains to a new server at WebHostingBuzz.com, we continued writing articles, uploading, embellishing, and fine-tuning everything. Everything seemed fine. At first…

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As you may have read, we recently transferred our websites to a new server. Although the overall process went smoothly enough, several learning opportunities unfolded during the transfer of our humble Perishable Press website…

First, the setup. Perishable Press is a WordPress-powered website. On our previous server, we were running a Fantastico-installed WordPress version 2.0.2, upgraded from version 2.0. Permalinks were enabled and everything was running smoothly. Our database was only 13MB in size and around 12MB of that was disposable statistics information from WP-ShortStat and Bad Behavior. The crucial part of our database was a friendly 1MB in size.

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About a year ago we signed up with a hosting provider that offered one of the best hosting deals around: lots of space, bandwidth, and transfer — plus all of the usual server software amenities that make life easier. Everything went smoothly at first…

In fact, the first six months of service were close to 100%. The few help-ticket items submitted were promptly resolved in a professional manner. We were ready to start some business and everything was going great. Then, about five months ago, we began noticing a serious increase in server downtime. Help tickets were also slow-going and the responses were like these cryptic one-liners that failed to address the actual problem, demonstrating a serious lack of concern and providing virtually no help. Further, multiple emails concerning account billing and renewal went (and remain) completely ignored. Indeed, email remains their only method of communication. At this point, we felt stranded, ignored, and utterly alone. Given this level of service, we were not comfortable hosting websites for our clients.

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Praise the Lord! Perishable Press now humbly resides on a new server. Time for a little break..