Logging the Switch

Tag: Abraracourcix

  • Making a static copy of a Wordpress blog

    After Abraracourcix the Iceland blog was next to move places.

    The weblog is a Wordpress installation and thus the content is dynamically generated by PHP, using data in a MySQL database. This dynamic behavior is unnecessary for a weblog that has been closed and I therefore ventured on a plan to download the full website and make it available as a rather large set of plain static HTML files.

    The first step you’d like to take when doing this is checking that the directory structure of the pages is to your liking. A standard Wordpress installation leaves a pretty clean structure: directories for each year, one for categories. If you have pages, they will show up with directories of their own.

    These directories don’t actually exist on the server but are constructed by URL rewriting on the side of Wordpress. Very nice.

    Now you take wget and run it once over your entire site, for me it was wget -nv -r http://ijsland.luijten.org/. If you now look inside the HTML files, you’ll notice lots of absolute hypertext references back to your own site. This is because of the options home and siteurl in Wordpress you’ll want to change. I changed them both to /.

    Next I went into the theme files (make a backup of them) and removed all forms, like search and comment forms. I also removed any reference to RSS feeds and other scripts from the header. You may also want to remove eventual Feedburner references for tracking visitors.

    The site is now ready for one last sweep with wget.

    If you find that some images of the layout aren’t loaded correctly, it might be that they are referenced from the CSS file and not directly from any HTML files. You’ll have to open the CSS file and download these images yourself.

    Don’t forget to make a backup of the database, you might want to reopen the weblog somewhere in the future!

    So, next time you’re at http://ijsland.luijten.org/, you’re being served static HTML files by lighttpd.

    Lees verder

  • Migration successful

    Over the weekend, I have transferred the web site from Abraracourcix to Sunny. I’m in the process of slowly phasing out Abraracourcix’ services, eventually moving the hard disk into Sunny and then put it to a well deserved sleep.

    My own mail setup has been moved to Sunny already, the other accounts will follow somewhere in the next few weeks.

    The web server changed from Apache to lighttpd and so far, I’m pretty satisfied with it. Configuration is a breeze, it responds quickly, logs are in the common logfile format so the local Webalizer statistics also still work, there’s an RRDtool plugin which makes it pretty easy to construct graphs of the web traffic (also per virtual host or even for specific directories).

    Abraracourcix has been my personal server for more than 7 years. It was a router for the internet connection at my parents’ home and before that it used to be my desktop. In 2003, operations moved to Spacelabs where it became the main web and e-mail server for the luijten.org domain, serving up all static web content and doing SMTP and IMAP.
    Especially the latter service is very heavy for this Pentium 166 with only 48 MB RAM, so it had to go off the machine.

    Sunny is a Sun Ultra 5 desktop machine with a UltraSparc IIi at 360 MHz and 256 MB RAM, which should be able to hold up the load a bit longer. I got this somewhere in 2005 from Tilburg University who were dumping their old hardware.

    Lees verder