After almost a week, I somehow managed to make it back online. The files, mailsettings and all other stuff except the database were simple to move to the new cluster. Since WordPress, Mambo and other scripts I had running on the server used utf-8 for character encoding, the migration proved somewhat difficult. With the old version of phpmyadmin, I couldn’t set the collation of the database, and to be honest, up to this week I didn’t even know databases had a setting for encodings. It turns out the old collation was latin1 (surprise, surprise), and setting the new one to utf-8 and importing the tables in utf-8 didn’t work for me, all characters were kaput. It turns out, that databases have their internal encoding which creates the whole problem. For wordpress, either using a wp-plugin or find a way to issue a SET NAMES ‘latin1′ command right after WP is done connecting. The easier option for me was to create a new table which is set to latin1 as the old one. Problem solved and blogged, hopefully others will find this hint useful to circumvent character set encoding problems.
On another note, today is the day. My wife’s due, but the little guy seems to be comfortable enough inside. We might have to wait for a few days, but there’s no need to rush. We bought everything we need, the name is decided and people are calling in the whole time and ask whether “it happened” or not. Stay tuned.
Welcome back online! And best of luck with the birth! I hope all goes well and you tell us the name too!
Hi there. I noticed your post on the WordPress support site about having trouble linking to photos from your Blogger account. I’ve been having the exact same problem — I’m aggregating my students’ blogger sites onto one site at http://www.levjoy.com/orsem, but their photos don’t show up and I get the same error message you received. Did you ever find a solution to this?
Hi Joshm
I’m pretty sure it is a software barrier keeping all requests outside of blogger and or google urls from displaying the pictures. Try a search on hotlinking, I’m pretty sure this is the case here. Internet Explorer gives me cryptic error messages for, but with Firefox, it’s pretty straightforward:
Access Denied.
Use Blogger, Hello and their free image hosting is for you, but if you move somewhere else, you have to start from scratch. My solution is to not depend on third party services, ever again. I switched to Gallery2, but that of course means I have to modify the code and upload all pictures I ever used on my own webserver or somewhere else. That way I can be sure that they’ll be accessible under other ‘circumstances’, lets say, after moving to another domain etc.
What you could do is using a blogger account and their webspace, but redirect your current site to it. Visitors won’t notice much of a difference.