2016-10-26

For large set of reasons, I have decided to move my blog site from the confines of WordPress to a different hosting solution; thus, http://veggiespam.wordpress.com becomes http://veggiespam.com. WordPress.com has a great advantage: preexisting userbase and by moving the site to differently-hosted, I am giving that up. Since I get few comments on my public and private posts, it will make life easier just to not allow users on this site; I don’t want to self-manage posts and users. Pluses and minuses, but this move has to be done.

The old website and user commentary will remain at http://veggiespam.wordpress.com and there could be a future occasion where I cross-post to the old site so as to enable commentary. But, that will be rare. I copied existing comments to this site.

However, the old http://veggiespam.com site contained tons and tons of private information, about ¼ TB according to my provider. So, I had to ensure that all data can still be accessed by those that need it while not getting overwritten or preempted by the WordPress index.php processor. Thankfully, WordPress now allows this with a starting set of instructions Giving WordPress Own_Directory#Pre-existing subdirectory.

  1. Reconfigure the website to “use both http://www.veggiespam.com/ and http://veggiespam.com/” instead of forcing www. I guess I’ll go begrudgingly into the non-www named server era.
  2. Follow the directions 1-3 from the URL above.
  3. At step 4, be careful to not wipe the existing root-level .htaccess with the WordPress .htaccess file. WordPress really should caution people on that…
  4. Follow the directions 5-7.
  5. Go back to Settings and change the “site url setting to http://veggiespam.com/blog/ ” (note, if you go there directly, you’ll get page not found, but that’s fine).
  6. Configure the site for: “Remove WWW: Make http://www.veggiespam.com/ redirect to http://veggiespam.com/ “.
  7. Profit.

If you forget step 1 and just do step 5 first, then you’ll just get into a redirect loop. Doh.

Let’s hope a future auto-update to WordPress doesn’t wipe all of this out.

&crosses-fingers;