Blog Update

I have decided to change my blog from DotClear to WordPress.

The change should be very smooth, but please tell me if you notice anything wrong.

I’ll update the design later. [Note: I have updated the design, but it's not finalized yet.]
I have also added a new poll on the sidebar to know where you live. Yes I’m curious =)

Notes on migrating from DotClear to WordPress

Importing posts and comments

WordPress can import DotClear posts. I didn’t manage to import posts with french characters correctly because of some encoding hell.

The DotClear importer didn’t like to have that much posts to import, and complained something like :

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 327859 bytes) in …

The only solution I found is to import posts little by little.

There is certainly a much better way to handle this, especially if you’re a SQL export, but I’m not, so here’s the hard way :

• Backup the dotclear database
• Delete the posts you don’t want to import
• Important if you want to keep your comments : also delete the comments that go with the posts you deleted
• Use the WordPress importer.
• Reload the entire dotclear database
• Delete some other posts
• Repeat …

Keeping dotclear permalinks and rss/atom feeds
My dotclear permalinks used the postId in the url, so I have to get rid of it to match the wordpress format.

Dotclear :

http://cb.nowan.net/blog/index.php/2006/12/16/280-my-wii-and-the-child-in-all-of-us

WordPress :

http://cb.nowan.net/wblog/2006/12/16/my-wii-and-the-child-in-all-of-us/

If you want that the permalinks generated by dotclear be still valid, you have to use the mod_rewrite option of your apache server.

Same goes for rss/atom posts and comments feeds.
Check my .htaccess file.