Things have been very hectic lately, in the midst of which I have been franticly trying to get the blog up and running on a new website. I have finally finished migrating the database, and the blog, and the comments, without loss of anything really (Yeah!). Migrating the bugs database which involves full bug tracking for the game and the engine was a real pain and I must admit I had some anxious moments, but that too is now fully migrated.

So now my official website is www.susheelspace.com (, which by the way is still being worked on) and the blog is now at (blog.susheelspace.com). However I doubt if I will be able to move the original site very soon since there are other pressing issues at hand, but I hope to get to it in a couple of weeks.

Migrating any site that runs off a database can be painful. The only way is to have some way to export the database to a file and then reload the same at another place. That can be a pain in the neck especially if the exporter-importer (in my case phpMyadmin) are of different versions. If you thought that was painful, In my case however I had to split my original database into 3 separate ones. I ended up doing some heavy SQL work to get the old data in the new databases. Well I must admit, my SQL knife is not as sharp as it once used to be and this exercise turned out to be a nice refresher course in the end. Using raw SQL is probably the easiest and the most fool-proof way of migrating a site. Programs like phpMyAdmin will export to SQL, but be prepared for some tweaks to that. I tried other methods like using a migrator script but that just doesn’t work. My only recommendation is, “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty with SQL”.

Migrating the wordpress database ended up being an anticlimax. I tried messing around with the database, but there are some incompatibilities between the older version and the newer version. I tried a couple of different things, but in the end the easiest way to migrate a wordpress blog to a new site is by using the “Export” option (“Manage >> Export”) which saves the blog contents to an XML file, and then “Import” it to the new site. A word of caution, you may have to hand edit the XML file to replace the web links of your old site, example, “www.myoldsite.com/?p=64” to “www.mynewsite.com/?p=64”. Just make sure you check the entire XML file. I know it can be a pain, but at the very least check the weblinks. Also you will have to migrate the blog/wp-content/uploads directory of your old site to the new one.