I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.

Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.