ordpress.com is great. They’ve got a great freemium model that allows anyone to get hooked up with a blog with the swiftness. I’m a huge fan, but of course there are limits in what you can do when you don’t have your own hosting.  They have limitations on plugins and themes and so on.
I recently helped my friend Tove Hermanson migrate her thoughtful fashion blog to her own hosting. I recommended she choose Dreamhost, as I’ve had a great experience with them.
We had a few setbacks when we did things out of order, so I’m writing up a short guide to doing this so it will be easier for other folks. If you still are unhappy after following this guide, you may need a different hat.
First things first, you will want to export information out of your old blog. Log into your blog and do the following:

1. Note your theme so you can install it at your new hosting¹
2. Note what plugins you are using, and any widgets or whatnot you’ve got on your blog.
3. Note your link structure. How are your posts organized? You definitely want this so you don’t break any old links to your content.
4. Log into your blog at wordpress.com and export your blog contents to a file.
5. Get your images. Wordpress.com says that you can import your images and such at your new blog, but we didn’t see the full sized images getting downloaded. Hence, I’ve written a script to get all of your full sized images from your wordpress.com blog.
   1. Download and install Python and BeautifulSoup.
   2. Use my python image spider to collect all of your images from your blog and put them into a neat little bundle for you.
6. Do a find and replace on your export file to change all your img tags from “yourdomain.files.wordpress.com” to “yourdomain.com/oldimages”
7. Buy your domain and hosting.  As before, I really like dreamhost, as they are cheap, cheerful and easy to use.  For a personal site, those are the factors that matter.   Clicking those links will give me a 10% kickback, but I’d recommend them even if I didn’t get a taste. ²
8. Switch your domain nameservers to point to your new hosting.  When you are buying your hosting, they will have instructions on how to do that.  The place where you bought your domain name will also have a way for you to switch where your nameservers point to.  If you are using dreamhost, you’ll be using NS1.dreamhost.com, NS2.dreamhost.com and NS3.dreamhost.com.
9. Install wordpress at your new hosting. If you’ve chosen dreamhost, they will do it for you.
   1. From your control panel choose “Goodies”
   2. Click “One-Click Installs”
   3. Advanced Mode (It isn’t all that advanced>) and follow the instructions.
10. Log in to your new wordpress installation and import your blog export file
11. Configure your themes, widgets, url structure and so forth through the wordpress settings.
12. Use an FTP client like Filezilla or FireFTP to upload your “oldimages” images folder to your server, right under your new domain’s root directory.
13. Take a look at the new blog and test! You should be good to go.

That seems like a lot, but you can probably accomplish all of this in an hour or two. You’ll spend some time waiting for DNS changes to propagate, but it should be fairly seamless. The key is to extract all of the information you need from your old website domain before you change your domain url to point to your new hosting. We made a few mistakes doing that and it just takes forever to switch back and forth.

Good luck, hope these instructions help!

How to Migrate from Wordpress.com to Wordpress.org is a post from: More Light! More Light!

1. Tove had Chaotic Soul which seems to have major problems and differences between the official version and the one wordpress.com uses.
2. You could always register with dreamhost without my referral as well.

Such a terrible scary monster! Such scary glowing eyes!

Fortunately, a t-shirt ninja appeared on the scene, swift, silent and slinky deadly.

Check out that ninja! Such crazy weaponry! The ninja and the robot fought very hard but finally, locked in combat, they stared eye to photoreceptor and gave in to sweet love. They settled down and are raising an evil army of robot ninjas.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Ninja Vs Robot is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-17 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-16 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-15 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-14 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

I mounted the Benno TV Bench with Panel on Grundtal Legs. We didn’t want to block a vent during the winter, and we also like the look of a tv floating higher in the air. I also removed the Benno’s apron so the leather cube poufs would fit underneath.

The 17″ Grundtal legs are done in a W so they fit the shallower Benno, and they are screwed to a piece of ply attached to the Benno’s supports. It is very stable so far and I’m quite satisfied.

Yes, I was going to build this all myself, but $140 for the Benno plus $50 for the legs is just wicked easy.

Ikea Hack – Raised TV Panel is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-10 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-08 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

So I wanted a custom spice rack, one that would really help my restaurant, but I didn’t want to build it myself.  I’m no carpenter.  I hired one though.
“Can you build me a spice rack? Here’s what I need – ”
“Just a sec,” he interrupted. “I’m going to start building some hammers while you talk.”
“Don’t you already have some hammers?”
“Sure, but those were for past projects.  There’s better ways to build hammers these days.”
“Here – I have a hammer already.  It got left behind by the guy who hung the pictures in the restaurant.  Use this.”
“SIR! I don’t think that using a framing hammer is going to help us develop this spicerack.  Please!”

Why the Business Hates the Software Developers is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-10-03 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

The promise is an open source of subtitles for video. Now the subtitles won’t be restricted to the people who made the video. They are anticipating use for the hearing impaired and for translations.  Why am I excited?

The project is also designed to make this decentralized, so that it can be implemented by other video players, and so that users can subscribe to multiple sites of subtitles.  That’s the interesting bit!

I’m seeing subtitles as commentary, subtitles with contrasting dialogue, snarky notes about continuity issues and product placement, or political connections…  Imagine the amazing ShiftSpace web experience¹, or Google’s Sidewiki, but for video.

It’s just cream that the project was funded by tiny donations from lots of strangers².

How could you hack open subtitles? is a post from: More Light! More Light!

1. I know Mushon through Eyebeam and Add-Art
2. I’m one of them

links for 2009-10-02 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

class friend_paste
:has_many => languages
def gripe
puts "What, no Mythryl?"
end
end
# good lord they support a lot of syntax highlighting.

links for 2009-10-01 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

I found him through the stupidest, most sexist article I have read this year.

He argues:

The power of female choice becomes quite apparent in a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a moment a society where sex and mating were entirely a male choice; individuals have sex whenever and with whomever men want, not whenever and with whomever women want. What would happen in such a society? Absolutely nothing, because people would never stop having sex! There would be no civilization in such a society, because people would not do anything besides have sex. This, incidentally, is the reason why gay men never stop having sex: there are no women in their relationships to say no.

This is the the point where I immediately knew Kanazawa cannot think.¹  Does he think that gay men do not hold jobs or have careers?  That they get nothing done?  That women do not want to have sex?²   It takes but a moment’s reflection for any thinking person to look at that paragraph after having written it.  In a room where candles are going out from lack of oxygen one should still see the contradictions and quickly delete it.

Kanazawa cemented my opinion in the next paragraph.

This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software, in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.  There would be no civilization, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice.

Surely he is aware that gay warriors, musicians, authors, poets, artists, scientists might be a slight rebuttal to his idea?

I no longer believe that he is aware of this.  I read another article where Kanazawa advocates killing every human being in the mideast as a solution to terrorism.  His list of articles is a grand collection of logical fallacies.

I do not approve of ad-hominem arguments. However, if  Satoshi Kanazawa makes any statement, I would be biased to think the statement is wrong.

Satoshi Kanazawa cannot think. is a post from: More Light! More Light!

1. I would also guess that he does not or cannot read the news, let alone know any gay people.  How else could he have missed the great number of gay men struggling for the right to marry?
2. Later in the article he reveals that his problem is small sample size.  Women do not want to have sex with Satoshi Kanazawa, and he generalizes from that. 

links for 2009-09-30 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

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links for 2009-09-25 is a post from: More Light! More Light!

links for 2009-09-24 is a post from: More Light! More Light!