kate's infrastructure

A few days away from the problem hasn’t really given me any new perspective.  I’ve cleaned up my old host and tried to get rid of anything not absolutely mandatory.  It’s really frustrating to run the same export repeatedly and get different results each time.  Kind of makes it hard to pinpoint the problem.

Interestingly, I did notice that the webalizer software installed on my old host shows completely different stats from google analytics.  Probably worthy fodder for a future investigation. 

Anyway I had decided to give up on WordPress exports and simply deal with this as a mySQL issue, here’s the score:

• I created a db export using PHPmyAdmin on my old host.  The script generated the full create data for the DB.  Somewhat less useful than it seems.
• On recommendation from TechDuke, I tried using the bigdump script to import my db from the db, though this is generally targeted at people with specific import issues.  Laziness was my specific issue.  It didn’t work on the first run, but I think I’ll bookmark it to review again.

Reviewing the previous wordpress export attempts, the most frustrating thing was how many comments I’d previously marked as spam were clearly still in the DB.   Overall, the function wasn’t working for the posts I wanted, but it treated spam nicely.  I decided if this process was going to succeed, by any method, I had to fix the spam.

• A quick search and I stumbled upon a stroke of genius – just use phpMyAdmin to run a delete script on the spam comments.
• Query run in a few seconds.
• Re-ran export and I at least appear to have my latest posts.

Success seems closer.  Right now I’m deleting the wordpress install on my new host, I’ll re-install then try re-importing in a few minutes and we’ll see how it goes.