This year, my New Year’s Resolution was to get WordPress up and running, and replacing PivotX as my primary blogging software. Tada! I did this yesterday, and now I can wash my hands of doing WordPress installations for now. If you want to know why “WordPress installations” is plural, read on…

I’ll be the first to admit – I’m not your normal user of just about any software. If a software product is a round peg, I’ll inevitably want it to fit into a square hole, and I usually have the means to make it do that. Some examples: DokuWiki is a wiki software, I use it as a GMing tool; EDK is a killboard, I use it for storing and displaying skill information; PivotX is a blog, I used it for a blogging network. To be fair, all of these software packages do a great job, but there was some duct tape involved, in one form or another.

WordPress is a blog (and also a Content Management System). It even does blogging networks, so I thought this would be easy. But, of course, there’s always one thing that’s not quite right. You see, I don’t want WordPress to manage my entire site, just the part of my site that is my blog. I also refuse to install anything on the root of my site, so without even thinking about it, I sequestered it away right where I wanted it and went to town. It turns out, with that configuration, I had unintentionally made it so that WordPress couldn’t do subdomains for different blogs (it was forced to use subfolders). “Not a problem,” I thought, “this is what .htaccess is for!” And yet, for all of my work, I still couldn’t get WordPress subfolders to map blogs to subdomains properly. I sifted through forums for hours, and came away with two lessons: (1) A fair number of people have asked this question, and (2) it was impossible. Almost literally impossible, sans one post I found with someone doing it on IIS, who spent four pages describing the hoops to jump through with the low-level configuration.

Appalled and saddened (really, how can such a popular software product make something that impossible?), I set out to make WordPress think it was installed at the root and hack my way through the rest. This, it turned out, was fairly easy, and, upon closer inspection, even listed once in the advanced install guide. So, now wordpress had subdomains, but still wanted to rule my entire site. I was able to solve this latter issue easily, with a little bit of .htaccess magic, and now WordPress only thinks it rules my entire site, while being cordoned off in it’s corner.

By the time I had figured all of this out, I had installed wordpress at least a dozen times, imported all my entries from PivotX at least as many times, and really mastered how all this migration was going to work out. I would call that a success!

Then, of course, when I woke up this morning, I found that I had quite a few SPAM comments to dig through. Total time from install to SPAM? 12 hours, 8 minutes. I guess my work isn’t done…