Tag Archives

How To Migrate a WordPress Blog

By Monday, November 10, 2014 2 Compute , Permalink 1

One of things I love about WordPress it that it’s an open content platform. Being open, the platform understands that the user owns the content within. Truly owning your content means you should be able to take it out of the platform, and do whatever you want with it. WordPress makes it easy!

This post is a how-to guide on migrating a WordPress site. It covers:

  1. Exporting all your content from a hosted WordPress.com site.
  2. Importing the content to a self hosted WordPress site.

The export part applies also to self-hosted WordPress sites. I write specifically about a WordPress.com-hosted site because this is what I use for the example.

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Local WordPress Sandbox With Bitnami On OS X

By Monday, October 27, 2014 0 Compute , , Permalink 1

Whether you want to start your own WordPress-powered site, or you’re a WordPress developer – a local WordPress installation is a useful tool. Luckily, with the Bitnami WordPress stack, it’s also a breeze to set up!

WordPress, as a PHP-based web application, requires a full-blown web stack to run. At the very least, you’ll need a PHP-enabled web server, and a database engine. An often-used combination is the LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP.

Setting up a full stack on your own is definitely possible. For most, it’s not considered a fun way to spend an afternoon (or a weekend, if things get hairy). Got several computers with different OSes? Expect a completely different experience with each one…

Enter Bitnami. In a nutshell, Bitnami provides pre-configured, self-contained, application stacks for many popular web applications. And they do it for Windows, Linux, and OS X! Want to install a local WordPress stack? Simply download the installer for your platform, run it, and rejoice!

This short how-to post demonstrates installing a WordPress Bitnami stack on OS X.

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Escaping Shortcodes In WordPress Posts

By Sunday, October 26, 2014 0 Meta , , Permalink 0

WordPress shortcodes are an easy way to embed dynamic content in WordPress posts. But sometimes I want to write about using shortcodes. To display the verbatim shortcode text in a post, without having WordPress parse it, it must be escaped.

Escaping a shortcode is easy. Just double the enclosing square brackets.

For instance, to display [gallery] in a post, write [[gallery]].

For short codes with start and end tags, only double the first and last brackets: [[shortcode]...[/shortcode]].

It worths noting that currently the escaping will occur only if the shortcode is active. Escaping a disabled shortcode will result a doubling brackets in the output: [[fakeshortcode]] remains [[fakeshortcode]]…

This is true for WordPress 4.0, but is recognized as a bug. So if it’s fixed sometime in the future, and the above example contains a single bracket – let me know in the comments so I can fix this 🙂 .

Researching Content Platforms for The Ostrich Website

By Monday, October 6, 2014 2 Meta The Ostrich Website Permalink 0

To start a new website, I need to decide what content platform I am going to use. This is the second milestone in The Ostrich website project roadmap. This post is a project progress report, summarizing the completion of the milestone.

The outcome, as probably apparent if you’re reading this on my blog, is WordPress.

I experimented a little with SquareSpace, before deciding to return to WordPress. Read on to learn why.

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