A lil’ miraculous migration

Credits
Elegant word art (miracles take time) from Bethany
Love Bug Paper02 from Redju Designs

A few months ago, as the estimated due date of my pregnancy loomed nearer and nearer, I had an important decision to make.  I was torn between the decision to start a new blog for the new baby in our family, or migrating Ethan’s blog to another one, combining all posts for my kids into one blog.  After some deliberation, my hubby and I decided on the latter, because it would make more sense to publish, say, a vacation post involving the kids rather than duplicating content.

So off I scooted to get the migration done.

Little did I know that there would be so many obstacles that stood in the path of such a seemingly easy task.

At first I exported the XML file from Ethan’s blog to be imported to the new blog.  Creating the subdomain and the new WordPress blog was certainly a piece of cake, but when I tried to import the file, I realized that there was an 8MB size limit, and the XML I had imported was approximately 8.55MB.  Of course the import failed.

I then contacted my web host and they advised that I would need to restore the database from the old blog to the new blog, and that they would be happy to help me do it.  So that’s what they did.

… or so I thought.

When they told me they were done, I found out that they had actually pointed the new blog to the old one, and now the new blog redirects to the old one, which is definitely NOT what I wanted.  After a few days of them asking me to tweak the blog here and there, I finally managed to find an online tool called the WordPress Splitter, which was able to break up the huge XML file into smaller bite-size pieces. And when I tried it out, I was so happy that it actually worked!

So that was that… 🙂

I was pretty pleased with myself for solving that problem.

After importing the entire contents of the blog over, I realized that I wanted to create a new category called Ethan and assign it to all the posts in the new blog, but almost all the tools I found online were not able to do that.  But my days of searching finally paid off when I stumbled on this beauty of a plugin called the Assign Categories plugin.  In just a few minutes, I was done creating the new category and assigning all posts to it 🙂

I then realized my blogroll had not been imported.  Oh, I know I could manually key in the links one by one, but I knew there should be some importing tool of some sort…a shortcut that would make my life easier…and I found it!  With this, all I needed was to enter the OPML URL in the Import Blogroll screen, and watch as the magic happens.

So, I was nearly done with the importing, but I still had to work on the header image.  I wanted an image that was simple yet creative, and it took me many nights to come up with a header that I was contented with.

I added the finishing touches, edited the theme a little bit here and there, and finally I was ready to unveil my latest blog, with the arrival of baby Hannah!

And it is with extreme happiness and joy that I am proud to invite everyone to bid a warm hello and welcome to Little Miracles, where miracles truly do happen! 🙂