WordPress – The Page Not Found Blog

WordPress images missing after blog was moved

If you are reading this you probably just migrated your WordPress blog from one hosting provider to the other. If everything else on your blog has been restored and its working fine then congratulations since that was the hard part.

The good news is that restoring your images is fairly straightforward, and the even better news is you won’t have to manually modify all your image links. This should give you some relief!

Here are the steps:

Back up your database. Many hosting providers have this functionality built-in. If you are hosting your own blog it’s best to just go ahead get another fresh export of the database and copy it to your local machine again. This gives you the most up-to-date copy if something goes wrong in Step 6.
Open your most recent blog post that has a broken image. Copy and paste the broken URL into a text editor. You should be able to figure out the broken link by clicking on the missing image’s empty holder. Example:

https://www.myoldsite.com/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/test.png

Fix this one image only using the WordPress blog post editor and save your changes. Then refresh your browser and make sure the image is now displaying correctly.

IMPORTANT NOTE: In the majority of cases this step will go just fine. However, if it doesn’t then there are a few potentially tricky reasons why your changes may not show up immediately. It may depend on how your blog cache is set up, for example if you are using TotalCache you may have to manually blow away your blogs cache(s). Also some hosting providers may take a few minutes to update your data in the cloud. And, lastly you may have to delete your browser cache depending on how the web server that is hosting your blog is configured. Sorry, sometimes there’s no easy answer here, but I believe it’s better for you to be aware.

Now click on the new image and get its URL, then copy and paste the URL to your text editor. Note in my example there are some slight differences between the old and new URLs. It’s these differences that we need to correct. Example of a new URL:

https://www.mynewsite.com/htdocs/WordPress/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/test.jpg

Open up the database in a SQL editor window. One popular way to access the database is via phpMyAdmin.
In the text editor create a SQL UPDATE command from the URLs mentioned above that you copied and pasted then run the UPDATE command. Here’s an example template of how your command might look. Be sure to modify just the URLs so they fit your unique Blog:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content,’www.myoldsite.com/htdocs’,’www.mynewsite.com’);

Refresh your webpage and see if all the broken image links are restored.
If for some reason your website crashes or the pages get messed up then you will need to restore the database and start over with Step 1 above. The most common reason for any problems happening is there was a mistake made when creating the SQL UPDATE statement.

Reference

WordPress.org – Changing the site url

Why I’m considering removing blog comments

Many others before me have disabled their blog comments. In fact, a blog post by Seth Goden from 2006 still sticks in my mind and all the outcry it generated from around the web. The longer my blog has been around the worst the spam has gotten. In a way that kinda makes sense as my domain name gets shared via spammer databases and my growing number of blog post links get stored in search engine results.

Spam comments are awful. As of today, Askimet says it has blocked over 250,000 spam comments since March 2014. During the time it took to write this post I’ve already received 16 spam messages. For every single legitimate comment, I get 1,000 spam comments. Seriously. If managed improperly, spam comments can crash your blog if your hosting provider limits the size of your blog database.

This happened to me earlier in the year. Silly me, I thought that it would be impossible for me to go over my previous hosting providers pre-set 2 gigabyte database size limit any time soon. Most of my blog posts are text based and take up very little room. The entire size of my blog database was around 15 MBs. I didn’t even know there was a problem until I couldn’t create any more blog posts. Upon further examination I had received over 75,000 spam comments over a 30 day period and they were waiting patiently for deletion. I’m not exactly clear on why Askimet didn’t correctly report these, or automatically delete them within 15 days, or what exactly happened. One thing was clear: my comments table in the database was full of tens of thousands of spam comments. I thought I had set them for automatic deletion but apparently Askimet only auto-deletes the worst of the worst spam and everything else goes to the spam queue. Caveat Emptor.

I still think I see the value of comments in that everyone including me can benefit from the “shared” feedback including myself. But, the increasing amount of time and headaches spent dealing with spam is making me seriously reconsider.

Upgrade Anxiety – We all have it

As I type this I can see an icon indicating 10 plugins need to be upgraded on my blog. Most are minor upgrades with tweaks and fixes that don’t really affect me. Some, like the WP Super Cache update, are enough to give me nightmares of my blog having serious technical issues.

Oh wait…hah! Well, I actually did totally mess up my blog a couple years ago. I thought simply installing the WP Super Cache update would automatically preserve all of my settings. If you aren’t familiar with this WordPress plugin, it essentially provides a performance boost to your blog by having a gazillion caching-related knobs, bells and whistles that you can tune.

Yes, I did research the topic of upgrading beforehand. And at the time, deja vu, I found very little useful information other than people recommending you should upgrade. Caveat Emptor. I ended up paying a tech support person $175 to fix my mistake and my blog was totally messed up for about a week.

Okay, so now I make sure to backup/export all my WP Super Cache settings . Yet I still get the heebie-jeebies every single time I get its plug-in update notification. A few friends offered some not-so-tongue-in-cheek suggestions of why don’t I just learn about all the different settings and just experiment. “You have the skill(z),” they told me. I couldn’t argue with that.

What it really comes down to is “how” I want to spend my time. Like most members of the Esri Developer Evangelist team, I’m totally slammed at work and the outdoors keep me busy after hours and on most weekends. I don’t really care to learn the nitty-gritty intricacies of WP Super Cache and it’s hundreds of configuration permutations, along with all the other stuff I have to learn to stay on top of the latest technologies, APIs, etc.

In hindsight, now I know the WP Super Cache website doesn’t have a single link or tab that explains the various settings and configuration options. There are ten steps listed that don’t even begin to cover what happens if you change something, or what are the pluses and minuses of doing one setting versus another.

Lessons Learned:

You don’t have to accept all upgrades whether it’s your laptop, smartphone app, etc. I’ve gotten really good at skipping some. Others, like Chrome, happen automatically and even though they also occasionally introduce new bugs.
Note to self: Always, always back up your software, databases and settings.
Some upgrades deserve more attention than others. WP Super Cache is one of those upgrades that deserves your full attention to details. Spend time on forums reading and asking questions before hitting the upgrade button.
Some upgrades simply aren’t worth it. I’ve dropped a number of plug-ins that mysteriously started gathering information from my blog such as AddThis. I was running a protocol analyzer at the time and I noticed strange http requests to a 3rd party URL. Not only were the synchronous http requests slowing down my website, but when I visited the 3rd party website the details of what they did were extremely vague.
The last lesson learned is actually a note to software vendors that may be reading this. Too many upgrade notifications per month is very annoying. Unless you find a fatal bug, one upgrade per month is about my limit.