Importing WordPress content to self-hosted Dreamhost
Was difficult but I got it sorted eventually.
I began with my content on my old blog: http://flowingmotion.wordpress.com, and I had already installed the shell of WordPress using a One Click install on Dreamhost.
Export
To move my content from my old blog to my new blog, I went to my old blog (on WordPress.com), chose Admin, scrolled down the left-bar to Tools, and selected export. WordPress automatically downloaded all my posts, categories, tags, comments and authors to a file on the hard drive on my laptop.
Import
To upload the content at my new blog on Dreamhost, I went to http://flowingmotion.jojordan.org/wp-admin and logged in. I chose Admin, scrolled down the left-bar to Tools and chose import.
Import Fail!
I followed the instructions and it timed out after 30 seconds.
Roadblock
If I were importing to a blog on my localhost (WordPress on my laptop), I could edit my .htaccess file and set the maximum execution time to 3 minutes. I can’t do this if I have One Click installed on Dream Host. I have access to all other files but not that one.
Workaround
Fortunately, someone has already solved this and has written a program to split the WXR (RSS XML) file that I had exported so successfully from my original blog.
WordPress WXR (RSS XML) Splitter
WordPress WXR (RSS XML) Splitter is downloadable as a zip file. I made a sub-folder in my WordPress themes folder and unzipped the splitter programme there. Then I ran it and inserted the path and name of the file of blog content that I had downloaded from WordPress.
Advantages of splitting the file of your blog content
My objective was to split the file into smaller files that I could import into my new blog one after the other.
I didn’t want to faff about so I cautiously set the splitter at 40 posts per file. I suspect more could be crammed in but I went the cautious route of 23 by 40 posts. Splitter runs fast and made me 23 files neatly labelled from 0 to 22.
I went back to my new blog and tried again (Admin-Tools-Import). And it all worked perfectly though it took me well over half-an-hour.
Result
So now I have a working theme with all my blogs, categories and tags, on a self-hosted blog at Dreamhost, and I can start tidying up details like RSS feeds, Google Analytics, email subscribe forms, and so on.
UPDATE from Dreamhost
“If I were importing to a blog on my localhost (WordPress on my laptop),
I could edit my .htaccess file and set the maximum execution time to 3
minutes. I can’t do this if I have One Click installed on Dream Host. I
have access to all other files but not that one.”
You do have access to the .htaccess file. The One-Click installer doesn’t
prevent that, you have access and can change/delete any file in that
directory.
The problem is that the “php_value max_execution_time 180” addition to
the .htaccess file will not change how PHP runs in the DreamHost
environment. It worked on your home computer because you are running PHP
as an Apache module (mod_php). On the DreamHost servers however PHP
processes are run in CGI mode. This means PHP will work independent of
Apache and therefor doesn’t look in the .htaccess file (this file passes
instructions to Apache) for configuration changes. When running PHP in
CGI mode most configuration changes come from the php.ini file which is
owned by the root user and therefor can’t be modified directly by your
user.