Ideas….

I have a Wordpress MU site that I wanted to move to a new server, and here’s how I did it.  I’m writing this because I did it once, and then forgot how to do it again.  I have a mind like a sieve.

1. First I tarred up all the files for the directory:
   

   tar cvzf wordpress.tgz wordpress/

    

2. Then I backed up the mysql database:
   

   mysqldump -u root -p wordpress > wordpress.sql

    

3. When you back up a MySQL database it comes out as a simple text file.  You can open it up with a text editor (I have a mac and use TextWrangler).  I then use a simple find and replace in my text editor to find all the old URLs and replace them.  If you’re supper fancy you can use vi (which sometimes I do when I’m really really lazy and don’t want to go into a gui…yes I know that makes me a loser):
   

   :%s/old.url.com/new.url.com/g

    

4. The next thing that I did was move the sql file and the tar file over to my new server.  I then created the database in mysql:
   

   create database wordpress;

   and then imported the mysql export file into the database that I just created:

   mysql -u root -p wordpress < wordpress.sql

   Afterward, I double check that the database really is populated, but that’s because I’m a cautious person.  So I do a really quick:

   use wordpress;
show tables;

   Before moving on.
    

5. I then moved the tar file into the web directory and unzipped it:
   

   tar xvzf wordpress.tgz

   This will unzip all the files and create the wordpress directory.
    

6. Finally you’ll want to go into your wp-config.php file and look at your database settings.  There is a section that reads:
   

   // ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'wordpress');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'wordpress'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
define('VHOST', 'no');
$base = '/wordpress/';

   Using this information you’ll want to create a MySQL user according to this information (or you can create any old user and change these values in the wp-config.php file).  The MySQL query to create the user referenced above is:

   grant all privileges on wordpress.* to 'wordpress'@'localhost' identified by 'wordpress';

   So now you have created the same wordpress user that you had on your other wordpressmu site.
    

7. At this point I like to double check that everything worked as planned.  You’ll want to go to your new URL and make sure that everything that was there before is there now.  Also tip:  don’t delete the old wordpressmu site until you’re certain the new one is working properly.
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Yesterday I went to the LITA sponsered talk about OAI-ORE. I went because I wanted to see the man (the myth, the legend) behind SFX and OpenURL, as well as bX, Ex Libris’ new recommender service.  Basically, if it weren’t for Herbert Van de Sompel’s brain I wouldn’t have had a job for the two years prior to working at Wheaton, so you know…I had to go.

So anyway, on to the real meat of the post.  What is ORE?  Well that’s a great question; let’s see if I can sum up what I’ve learned.

First, Herbert did a quick crash course on what RDF was.  It consisted of this:

• resources exist at a particular URI
• RDF is about explaining resources
• there are things called RDF triples, they consist of a subject, predicate, and object
• if you don’t have a URI for a resource you can have something called a literal

Below is an image of RDF triples:

Kind of an abstract idea, but if you’re really interested in learning more check out W3C’s page on RDF, perhaps reading the RDF primer first (of course I recommend this, but I have yet to do that myself).

Ok so now that we have a basic understanding of RDF we can move on and gain a basic understanding of ORE (supposedly).

The ORE Primer states that:

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources.

Brilliant, so now instead of just describing one resource we can aggregate resources together, but then what?  OAI-ORE uses the same http 303 redirect guidelines that linked data does to redirect users to something called a resource map.  This map describes how the different resources in the aggregation are related to one another.

What’s great about the resource map is that it lives in what Herbert calls the two web worlds (web 2.0 and the semantic web).  The resource map can be written in Atom XML, RDF, and RDFa (RDFa is like RDF except in XHTML rather than XML).

So now we can have aggregations of resources in a machine readable map rather than sitting out there as seperate resources seemingly unrelated to one another.

Herbet went on to say that Dr. Robert Sanderson at the University of Liverpool actually went through and created resource maps for everything in JSTOR.  You can find out a little more about this project via this Code4Lib listserv posting.

So that’s OAI-ORE in a nutshell.  A very small, simple minded nutshell.

We were discussing metacourses and email certain members of a metacourse and thought, I wonder if Quickmail uses group. Unfortunately the version of Quickmail we’re currently using doesn’t do that. However there is a patch for Quickmail that allows you to email groups.

Documenting it here for future reference.