After less than one year online, I decided to get serious with Chichipanguanorrea and give it a nicer home. I bought 2.4GB of space at DreamHost to host my site and I also bought the jllo.net domain. My idea is to host my brother’s, my mother’s and my dad’s sites as well, and also ask my sister and other relatives if they are interested on having their own web site.

Since now I have all the power of MySQL, I replaced my SimplePHPBlog system with WordPress.

All I had to do was generate an RSS from my old site and import it to the new one (see details below). I lost the comments on the posts, but I don’t care too much about that. I also had to fix some characters (vowels with tilde and ‘ñ’s) and remove an annoying CDATA section enclosing the posts. I also had to re-categorize the posts. But the whole process didn’t take more than 1 hour.

I also created a cool header with some of my hobbies represented in there.

Chichipanguanorrea 3.0 is juicer and prettier than ever!

Migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress

When I did this the versions were: SPHPBlog 0.4.0 and WP 1.5

I noticed that I got a few visits to my site from people looking on migrating from SimplePHPBlog to WordPress, so I decided to give a more detailed explanation of the process. I hope I can remember all the steps since I did it a few months ago.

Change the preferences of the SimplePHPBlog, so it displays ALL the posts you have ever created in the main page, and not just the last 10 or 15. Then export your current SimplePHPBlog as an RSS document. From the main page of your SimplePHPBlog, right-click the ‘RSS 2.0’ orange icon (on the right sidebar) and select ‘Save Link as…’ and choose a file name like ‘my_old_site.xml’.

When I imported my blog I lost the categories and had to create them and assign them to the posts manually. I think that if you create the old categories in WP (use the same names. Is it case sensitive? not sure) before importing the RSS then WP will assign them properly during the import process. Let me know if you get this part to work.

Now import the RSS inside WordPress.

The sad part: you’ll loose all the comments inside the posts. I didn’t found an easy way of importing them. Oh well, life is never perfect…

And finally the ugly part:
The RSS generated by SimplePHPBlog, encloses the post body inside the <description> tag and adds a ![CDATA[…]] enclosure to it…

For example:
<description><![CDATA[This is the text of my post... blah blah blah...]]></description>

CDATA sections allow you to enclose text inside XML without having to worry about escaping XML special characters like <, >, ' or ".

But WordPress doesn’t remove the CDATA sections so you have to do it manually after you are done importing your XML. Yes, you have to do this on each post.

I also had to fix special characters like tildes (á, é, í, ó, ú) and Eñes, since I had some posts in spanish.

I’m thinking that a better option is to use a text editor and remove all the CDATA sections. Do a manual find/replace on the XML looking for <![CDATA[ and replacing it with blank text. Also replace ]]> with blank text.

Save the XML and open it with an XML parser to make sure it is still valid. Most browsers can parse XML.

If you succesfully tried this second option, leave a message here to let us know that it works.