Empress Of Drac, A Cebuana Blogger

I dunno what happened.  I’ve been busy for a few weeks and laid low in checking my site’s stats.  I just found out yesterday that this site has been removed from google’s search results list.  I found this by keying in my major keyword “empressofdrac“.  I used to google my site using that keyword and my main page always tops the results list, but yesterday, it’s the other way around.  I can’t find my site even in the last pages of the results list.  Instead it’s my forum which is hosted freely in forumer.com on the top .

I googled to check what happened.  I found out that google will remove your site if you put illegal stuff in there or when you do some dirty tricks to raise your page’s popularity.  But I did none of the above.

I checked my all in one SEO plug in set up and what I noticed is all the no index options are checked.  But I don’t think this has something to do with it.  The no index there are just for my categories, archives, and tag archives.  This is really a mystery to me.  I guess I need to do further investigation.

A group of individuals who are creepily lurking in the shadow of anonymity they called the internet. They are not online criminals nor system hackers, but they will surely cause havoc in your system of thoughts as they will dissect the most titillating spots about sex, pornography, incest, STDs…everything sex related.

No inhibitions, no second thoughts, no non-sense…just pure and mature discussion of things that are mostly considered taboo by the common folks. Curious lurkers are welcome to comment, and nasty suggestions will always be considered. LoL!

The Savant Moaners

http://thesavantmoaners.blogspot.com

The Cebu Bloggers Society,  headed by Kevin Ray N. Chua,  met Nick of FilipinoVoices.com yesterday, November 22, 2008 at Bo’s Cafe, Ayala,  around four in the afternoon.  FilipinoVoices.com is a collaborative blog of Filipino bloggers which focuses on News, Politics, and Social Commentary.

The main agenda of the meet-up was to discuss the participation of Cebu bloggers in terms of citizen journalism which focuses on Political and Social blogging.  Through this, a movement can be formed where local based bloggers could become reliable sources when it comes to political and social awareness.

Here is an excerpt of the copy of  Overview and Responsibilities sheet handed by Nick to us during the meet up.

The bloggers will be our correspondents, playing an important role in providing key insight, information, and analysis where they will most likely be informed that other bloggers and writers from outside of the area.

Today is the beginning of The Cebu Bloggers’ participation in a grassroot movement that will take back our voice, and finally give back to the people, the power that is rightly theirs.

Thus The Cebu bloggers will be crucial so that our readers will have a more updated, more in depth look on the issues that are facing Cebu specifically.  Opinions, views, and analysis coming from not outside, but those who live and breathe Mindanao..

The CBS members who were present during the meeting were  Sinjin, X, Empress, Vanjahn, Rodel, Atenean, and Clarence joined us later on.  For those bloggers who are interested to become contributors to FilipinoVoices.com, you can email to Nick the following details:

1. Preferred Username and Password(for login purposes)
2. Avatar Photo(200×200)
3. Display Name(posted with your articles)
4. A blurb of yourself(a brief description that will be at th end of your every post)
5. An in depth description of yourself to be featured on the About page so that readers will know more about you.

Photo Credits: Vanjahn

I just watched MagTV Na, a local ABS-CBN show this morning. I don’t usually watch this show, but I waited for it because it would feature my co-CBS members in their segment that talks about blogging. And as expected, I saw five CBS members in the show. They were X, Rodel, Gerry, Clarence, and Kevin.

Rodel talked about his experience in making money thru blogging, X gave a brief description of his blogsite, Gerry explained that he started his blog as a hobby, Clarence talked about the content of his Dahong Laya blog, and Kevin talked about his controversial blogsite campaigning Sen. Mar Roxas candidacy for the 2010 presidential election. Kevin’s blog was also mentioned as one of the Philippines Top 100 Blogs.

It’s really great that the CBS group has little but constant exposures. The group started attending small talks, conferences, and then went to radio and now on TV. These are stepping stones for the group’s stability and these would also encourage fellow bloggers to join in. The more members the “manyer.” Hehehehe! Kudos to Cebu Bloggers Society!

Check here for more details about the MagTV interview.

1and1’s hosting platform is not the standard cPanel and DirectAdmin. As of now, I’m trying to locate the back up database function in their Webspace and Access area. Just a while ago, I tried to manually back up my files from the server through ftp, but my web browser (I use fireftp, mozilla’s add on) encountered an error and I have no choice but to close it. I’m actually using a lower version of firefox, and I noticed that it has lots of bugs. I need to upgrade it to firefox 3.0, the latest version.

So, why should we back up our wordpress blog? Backing up data is as necessary as the air you breathe. As a website or blog owner one should be well aware that it’s not only your host full responsibility to check on your database. It is advisable that you keep recent back ups in your local hard drive. That way, if anything goes wrong you can still restore your contents. And this should be done in regular basis.

Wordpress has a Database Backup plugin. Check it out.

That’s not really how you say it. The correct phrase or operational definition is actually transferring your blog hosted by wordpress.com to your self hosted webspace, wherein you install wordpress from wordpress.org to your own database.

Moving your blog from one host to another is quite easy if you’re just transferring it from blogger.com to wordpress.com, wordpress.com to xanga.com, and any sites which host blogs for free. But it’s easier said than done when you move from other host to your own hosted site. Like what other people said, it requires patience and you should be self-efficient and more resourceful.

I never thought it would take me 3 days to configure all these stuffs here. Anyways, I’m happy that I successfully managed to move all my contents from wordpress.com to my own server at 1and1.

I realize that it could have been easier if at the very start I already had my own domain and host. That way I can be saved from all the hassles in moving my contents. But, looking back I’m quite thankful that I went through those ordeals because I did learn a lot of things. And I will enumerate them below:

This is just a rough draft and not really a detailed procedure. Just check links for more itemized instructions.

1. The first thing you have to do in moving your blog from wordpress.com to your own host(assuming that you already bought a domain and webspace) is to create a database in you mysql administration in your cpanel. This database is where you will install your wordpress and also it is where you will put all your files for your blog.

2. Next, you set up your ftp account in your ftp administration in your cpanel. Then, install an ftp software in your pc. In my case a friend of mine recommended the fireftp add-on from mozilla. Fireftp is more practical because you just have to access it using your firefox browser, and it won’t consume space in your hard disc.

3. After setting up your ftp, you’re now ready to install your unzipped wordpress folder in your server’s root directory. I installed mine in the root directory for I preferred to access my blog site using my domain empressofdrac.com, instead of empressofdrac.com/blog(etc.).

4. When you’re done with your wordpress installation, you’re now ready to transfer your wordpress.com contents to your server. The first thing you will do is to export all your wordpress.com posts, links, categories, unpublished drafts, comments, etc., and save it to your local hard drive. All these contents will actually be saved in one xml file.

5. After exporting all your blog contents and have saved it as an xml file, you’re now ready to import it to your self-hosted site.

I actually encountered a problem in importing my contents. In my first attempt, not all my posts were being transferred. What I did was I deleted the already imported post in my Manage Posts dashboard area, and since wordpress has no bulk delete feature I have to delete them one by one. And that’s quite very tedious, and I really hate doing it. But I really have no choice. After that, I import my content again but the result was futile. And I deleted my posts again and reimport again and again, but my posts are still incomplete and I thought of just posting them again one by one(a very desperate thought).

Well, good thing my friend came to the rescue. What he did was he just reimported my exported xml file a few times, and when we saw the ALL DONE prompt message at the bottom page of the browser, he said that that’s the sign that all my posts have already been transferred completely. And it did!

My friend told me that it’s normal to have an incomplete transfer when you import contents. The only thing you have to do is to reimport it again and again until all the posts are transferred. No worries for post redundancy because the mysql function can detect a redundant file, that is, if a post already existed in the database it won’t be imported again. But this doesn’t really hold true based from my experience. After all my contents have been completely transferred, I found lots of redundant posts when I checked my blog site. What I did was I manually deleted all of them from my Manage Posts dashboard area.

6. The next thing you have to do is to properly index your site. In my case, I just deleted the default index.html file my host puts in my server’s root directory.

7. Now, you’ll be ready to set a redirection from your wordpress.com site to your self-hosted site, that is, if someone will click a link from your old wordpress.com blog he will be automatically redirected to your new website. This way your old traffic won’t be wasted. Wordpress.com charged $10 per year as a redirection fee.

I’m actually very thankful to this walk-through documentation written by those guys from blog-well.com. It is a complete step by step redirection procedure that would surely help you a lot. You just have to follow it religiously and I assure you that your site will be well-redirected.

8. Lastly, enjoy tweaking your newly self-hosted wordpress blog, and put any ads or java script goodies you’ve been wanting to grab(but are not allowed to by your host because of security issues) when you were still in wordpress.com!

Happy Blogging!