In case you’ve noticed some funniness on AlliterationAbound over the past couple days, it’s because I’ve been a lazy ass. A totally lazy ass. AlliterationAbound’s original host was LifelessPeople (LLP), which provided webhosting in exchange for a posting on their forum enough to meet a quota. While it was a wonderful system for those who wanted free, reliable, and supportive webhosting (plus a decent forum to boot) I would always find myself waiting until the last minute to start posting, and either spend a lot of time on the last couple days cranking out monster posts or have my webhosting revoked until I met my quota a day or two later.

Now that I’m in college, I don’t have the time to crank out that many posts. It was while I was checking out the deals at Fatwallet that I found out that GoDaddy, the wonderful company that lets this site be www.alliterationabound.com instead of alliterationabound.lifelesspeople.com, had hosting. Cheap hosting. Hosting that costs less than three dollars a month and offers way more space and bandwidth than LLP did. Even if I worked at a minimum wage job, I’d be able to pay for many months worth of webhosting in the time I spent on the LLP forum.

And besides, I’m a lazy ass. So here I am.

It took a couple days to get everything working properly, but I was able to transfer everything but the photo gallery (working on it) and the post categories (meh…).

GEEKINESS STARTS HERE. COHERENCY ENDS HERE.

GD offers a one-click installation of WordPress, but it hides the mysql database that WordPress runs off of so I couldn’t import the tables I exported from LLP. I created my own, except the handling of mysql databases by GD is really, really funky. I can only access a database at a time, and the table name cannot be different than the username used to access it. Not to mention that the host is different…making GD the 1% for which I can’t specify the host as localhost.

But that’s cool. I backed up everything using myphpadmin, but LLP and GD must have been using different versions of it, so I couldn’t find the Import tab. I researched other methods to import my posts, and ended up changing the RSS feed to display 9999 posts and then saving the entire feed to be sent through WordPress’s importer. Problem was that the comments were lost since they were in a separate feed, and the post urls were in reverse order.

I eventually sucked it up and emailed tech support, which answered in like, five seconds. It was scary. It was as if tech support knew my problem and had their hands over Ctrl-V, just waiting for my email. I was led to the Import tab, which was tucked away, and found that my database was four megs, way over the two meg import limit. I looked inside to see what was taking up all the space (since I have less than 120 posts) and I found hundreds upon hundreds of spam comments. It seems like Spam Karma didn’t actually remove them from the table, it just prevented WordPress from displaying them. So I manually went through and deleted enough comments to drop it from four megs to about 1.5 megs and imported the file. I ftp’ed the theme and plugins, tweaked the layout to include the time of day (as per Cristen’s request), and voila, you have the site you see before you.