Troppo is now running on the new server, held together with generous lashings of head-scratching and cursing on the part of yours truly.
Currently, the basic features of posting, commenting etc work.
However, as you can see, character sets are borked again. No amount of Googling, reading of MySQL docco, comparison to other configurations etc etc has yet managed to recreate the busted mix of utf8 and latin1 encoding which Dreamhost had, so right now a lot of stuff is looking Very Wrong Indeed.
Also on the todo list is to ensure that Missing Link’s email subscriber system is set up.
Please bear with me as I try not to suck in a spectacularly public fashion.
Update 9.29am: Yes, that turned out to be a false dawn. I’m now working on the busted permalinks mystery.
Update 9.49am: Fixed — Ubuntu (our server distro) doesn’t enable mod_rewrite by default. Wordpress relies on mod_rewrite to prettify permalinks. The solution is ‘a2enmod rewrite; apache2 force-reload’. Bah.
Update 1.45pm: Branched out into performance profiling. Now that we’re on a VPS I can install the xdebug extension, which suggests that our recent comments plugin is a real drag. I might try and find a lighter alternative.
Update 3.57pm: More performance tweaks. Enabling an inbuilt caching facility for Wordpress more than halves the number of queries performed to generate the front page. Also installed APC to save a little time on page rendering.
My advice would be to forget about trying to recreate DHs config, and just picking a char set to use – UTF8 of course. Then do global UPDATEs to fix borked encodings as and when you spot them. Assuming there are distinct borkednesses and not just the one for a variety of broken characters.
That’s becoming an attractive alternative I must admit. We had a similar borking last time we moved hosts because there was still another mysql configuration at the first place.
Since then I’ve been considering that instead of replacing characters with characters, I could cheat and replace them with HTML entities. It’s more or less guaranteed to work in my reckoning.
Still, all of this presupposes I can get MySQL to do what I want.
Your primary output is XML and its mutant spawn XHTML, so they’re not really cheating, entities, they’re best practice. Anything above that 7th bit should be declared as an entity or – preferably – numeric references. Otherwise you really limit your ability to move data around.
Looks like your new server wants to steal a few graphics, too (selectively, of course). That happened over at Catallaxy when we moved, too.