I know the general principle – you like something, you Stumble it – but it still baffles me.

A couple of years ago, an article in Head Rambles was Stumbled.   The effect was virtually instantaneous and a little alarming.  My hosting company phoned me to say they were on alert because of traffic to the server, it was that bad (or good, depending on your point of view).

Since then, that article has ridden through several Stumble Storms, as I call them.  None has been as powerful as the original, but they still cause massive traffic.

The graph above clearly shows the initial storm on October ‘08.  The majority of the little stalagmite peaks after that are mini-storms.  They appear to occur at random intervals and random intensity.

There is a storm in progress as I write this.

The graph above shows hourly traffic over a seven day period.  The storm started at around eleven last night and is easing off now, but the effect is very clear.  As storms go, it was a very minor one, but I’m not complaining.

What does baffle me is where these storms originate.  I have searched Stumbleupon and can find no mention of Head Rambles.  Presumably though there is a page somewhere that people are seeing?  Has it risen up the ranks again for a brief moment of glory? 

I have a lot to learn about this Internet lark!

Six of them are on my own servers and three have their own hosting.  After my last post, I thought I would try an experiment – to combine several of those blogs under one roof, so simplify maintenance and to streamline things.  Checking nine blogs on a regular basis for updates and upgrades can be tedious.

I set up WordPress MU on a test site.  For the sake of the test, I used a few spare domains I had lying around.

Installation of WPMU is simplicity itself, requiring only the basic knowledge of how to install a database [I used Cpanel] and the ability to change permissions on the server [again using Cpanel].

Having set up the root blog, I set up a subsidiary blog, and decided to try to mirror this site on it.  Once again, setting up the blog could not have been easier, but then my troubles started – how to I import all the features of this site onto the new one?  I want the two sites to be precise mirrors, so this involves copying the theme, the posts, comments, images, tags, categories and links.

Copying the theme is simple.  I just took a copy of the live theme folder, put it in the WPMU installation and activated it.

Copying the posts was relatively simple too.  All I did was to export the XML file from this site and then import into the other.  This gave me the ability to copy all the images as well which was just what I wanted.

I was now left with a problem.  The XML export/import facility does not include links or link categories.  This required a bit of lateral thinking.

In the end, I decided to use the sledgehammer approach. Using PHPMyAdmin, I exported this site’s entire database excluding “wp_options”, “wp_users” and “wp_usermeta”.  I then opened the downloaded file and made a simple change.

To explain the change I made, it is necessary to understand the construction of the WPMU database.  The root blog will contain its records in, for example “wp_posts”.  Anything starting with wp_ pertains to the root, or the global site.  The individual sub blogs contain a numerical prefix, so you will end up with “wp_2_posts”, “wp_3_posts” and so on.

I ascertained which prefix my sub blog was using and then did a simple find and replace on the entire database dump, replacing “wp_” with “wp_2_” or whatever the prefix is.  I then imported this file into the new WPMU database.

It may seem that I have duplicated things here, as I had already imported the posts and comments, but I did that essentially to just import the images.  I overwrote the information to maintain the integrity of all the ‘meta’ tables.

The result is rather effective – you can see it here, though please don’t leave any comments on it, as they will be dumped!

My next problem [and it’s a big one], is how to map my domain to pont as an alias to the new site.  So far, I can only point a domain to it, whereas I want the domain to act as an alias and to mimic precisely the URLs of all the old pages.

Any ideas?

I have nothing against WordPress itself, but I expected something pretty radical with the advent of a major release, and for the general user there is very little there.

Of course, one of the main features is the integration of WP with WPMU, but I wonder just how many use WPMU in the first place?

For the ordinary user, one of the major changes has been the departure from some of the default settings on installation.  From the security standpoint, this is a good thing.  No longer is Admin the default user, and the prefix to the database tables is now customisable, but the problem here is that it affects new installations only.  An upgrade from V2 to V3 is going to leave the old defaults intact, and to avail of the new settings one would have to scrap the old site and do a fresh install.  Even then, importing the old database into the new is going to be difficult, as all the table names will have changed.

Apart from the above, there are very few things that stand out.  A new default theme?  The ability to bulk update plugins?  As I said, I expected more from a primary upgrade.

I still love WordPress as a package, but this isn’t something I would queue all night for.

First and foremost, it should be pleasing to the eye.  It should also reflect the general content of the site, so that a simple glance at the screen should give an idea of the type of site it is.

Customising a theme can be simple or difficult, depending on how far you want to go.  My philosophy is to take a theme that is as close as possible to my final desire, and then to make the minimum of changes.  Head Rambles, for example has been through a couple of modifications.  It is now heavily customised to the point where the original theme is almost unrecognisable.

As I said before, I wasn’t too happy with the theme here.  I felt it was time for a radical overhaul of the entire site, both in look and name.

Why chose “A Pipe and a Keyboard”?  Mainly because it sums up my necessities for writing.  It is a personal site, with quite a bit of technical stuff, so the pipe represents the personal, and the keyboard represents the technical. 

I chose the design for its simplicity.  I like the simple layout, which doesn’t detract from the content, and apart from a few minor tweaks to the font, the only big change I have made (so far) is to substitute the banner image.  There are a few changes to be made yet, of a minor nature, such as additional navigation and tweaks like that.  I’m not too sure about the image, as yet.  I know the pipe looks a little unusual, but it is the pipe I generally smoke, so it deserves its place on the Internet. 

Whenever I want to do something like a bulk modification or something like that, I tend to search around for some kind of plugin or some other solution on the Internet.  I am rarely disappointed.

I have been doing some modifications over on Head Rambles where I have shifted the links (Blogroll) onto a separate page.  I wanted to go a little further with this and to do this, I needed to place the links into the database rather than have them hard coded on a page.

I am a great fan pf PHPMyAdmin, so writing up an SQL textfile to insert a batch of links into the Links Table was relatively simple.  The Links Table had some legacy stuff in there so the result was a refreshed table with 147 entries.  So far so good.

I wanted to set all my Links to a particular category, and this is where I ran into a problem.  The last thing I wanted to do was to have to manually edit 147 entries and it would have been extremely slow and tedious.  I searched high an low and found quite a few others trying to do the same thing, but no solutions.  I had discovered the numerical identity of the category (it was 2) and tried a bulk change of the field ‘link_category’ to 2.  This didn’t work, for some reason.

On delving a little further, I found that in fact the relationship between links and categories is held in the table Term_Relationships.  As an experiment, I went back to my text editor and built up a series of inserts for this table –

INSERT INTO `term_relationships` (`object_id`, `term_taxonomy_id`, `term_order`) VALUES
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0),
(X, 2, 0);

where X is the ID of the link. 

On running this file, I got several errors indicating duplicate fields.  These represented the legacy entries, which was fair enough.  I just deleted the relevant entries from the text file.

Ultimately, my batch fix worked, and all the links are now entered under their correct categories.

I strikes me though that this would be a fine opportunity for someone to develop a plugin that does batch jobs on Links?