Comments on: Updating Obsolete URLs in 10 Easy Steps

By: Kabitzin

Kabitzin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:36:55 +0000

I’ve updated the tutorial with input from Randall and my experience through literally going through the process step by step with Owen on IRC. I’m glad to hear that it has already been helpful to someone.

Also, note that if you are making backups through SQL exports, you need to be sure that you are using UTF-8. If you notice your queries in search have some code talking about converting to latin-1, you probably need to convert your database to UTF-8. Without the conversion, your outputted SQL for your backup may be messed up (so you should make a backup of the actual database file instead).

By: lolikitsune

lolikitsune — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:48:15 +0000

Thanks, Kabitzin and Randall! I recently changed my site’s forum software, which changed the URL format for linking to topics. I didn’t know how to search and replace in phpmyadmin so I was going through my main site posts correcting URLs one by one.

Anyway, I’m done now, and in a flash. Backing up the database took more time and energy than fixing all the links! Thanks again!

By: Kabitzin

Kabitzin — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:08:16 +0000

Randall, I am running through this right now with Owen, and I think you might have a point. This method works well for fields that have just a line of text (e.g. post_author_url), but not as well for post_content. The SQL query you ran is similar to what I did in correcting gibberish characters (due to the UTF-8 conversion that had hiccups), so I may rework this tutorial a bit… once I have finished experimenting on Owen’s guinea pig blog =D.

We ended up using:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'sorenara.ikimashou.net','omaemo.dasaku.net');

and

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url = REPLACE (comment_author_url, 'sorenara.ikimashou.net','omaemo.dasaku.net');

By: Randall Fitzgerald

Randall Fitzgerald — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:38:01 +0000

And anyone who needs MySQL access to their blogs, let me know, I can tell you guys how to get it.

By: IcyStorm

IcyStorm — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:35:44 +0000

Eh, the blog was on wordpress.com and the export/import process went terribly, so I just manually transferred most of my posts over. Whatever, it’s not like I’ll be transferring domains anytime soon. I will keep this bookmarked though, for future reference.

By: Randall Fitzgerald

Randall Fitzgerald — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:34:54 +0000

Thanks for trying to help out my poor users. Though, I have concerns that your query will replace entire post contents with “dasaku.net” and because the query you put forth will FIND posts with ikimashou.net, but changing a word… well… MySQL has a function to do it.

update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],’[string_to_find]‘,’[string_to_replace]‘);

And if anyone still has blogs that need fixups, let me know on dasaku with the contact form or whatever and I will patch things up. I am a busy man, so I missed some people I am sure.