Note: you need to have access to a Linux command prompt and the MySQL database via command line in order to perform this by my steps

Export…

First, we need to make an export of your current database, we’ll do this with mysqldump:
[text light=true]$ mysqldump -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName > dumpfile.sql[/text]
No, I didn’t forget a space after the -p flag. There is no space between the password flag, and the password itself.

Search and Replace

After that completes you should have a file named dumpfile.sql that contains your current database. Now it’s time to search and replace all references to the previous domain (we’ll call it domain-one.com) with our new domain (domain-two.com).
[text light=true]$ sed -i ‘s/domain-one.com/domain-two.com/g’ dumpfile.sql[/text]
The ‘-i’ flag is for inline. I simply replaces domain-one.com with domain-two.com where the command finds it. This means, any database settings or posts referencing the domain itself, will be altered, and therefore work when imported….so on to importing.

Importing the newly modified .sql backup

[text light=true]$ mysql -h yourhostnamehere -u YourUserName -pYourPasswordHere YourDatabaseName < dumpfile.sql[/text]
This command with the < or less than sign, pushes dumpfile.sql up to the database mentioned.

And there you have it, you just exported, modified, and imported an entire WordPress site including all categories, posts, users, etc…into a new database for use on a different site. Not so bad was it?

For more information on the sed command you can head over to brunolinux.com for a pretty decent sed tutorial and more options.

If you view the source code of your site after you’ve loaded it up in your favorite browser you’ll see a line like so:

[html][/html]

[php]function i_want_no_generators()
{
return ”;
}
add_filter(‘the_generator’,'i_want_no_generators’);
[/php]

Apply those changes, and save the file and you no longer have a version number reporting. Have no fear, the version will still report inside of the admin backend.

Alternatively, if you feel you need more security and don’t want to start messing with the WordPress core than this there is a great plug-in called Secure WordPress. This plug-in offers a wide array of security enhancements that include:

• Removing error-information on login-page
• Adds index.php plugin-directory (virtual)
• Removing the wp-version, except in admin-area
• Removing Really Simple Discovery
• Removing Windows Live Writer
• Removing core update information for non-admins
• Removing plugin-update information for non-admins
• Removing theme-update information for non-admins (only WP 2.8 and higher)
• Hids wp-version in backend-dashboard for non-admins
• Adds string for use WP Scanner
• Blocks bad queries
• Validates your site with a free malware and vulnerabilities scan with SiteSecurityMonitor.com

Finding the 404s

Most hosting providers will give you some sort of coarse statistics, but they don’t typically cover 404′s. To find this, we must manually look at the logs to get a better sense of the traffic seeing these unsightly errors. For this section, I’m working with a Linux based hosting environment in which I have SSH access.

Locate your log files
Mine happen to be in a folder named logs of my root hosting account. Your’s may be somewhere else but we need to get into that folder via a command line.

cd html/stats/logs

Locate lines in the logs with 404s
Once in this log files folder we’re going to use the Linux command ‘grep’ to search all files for the string ’404′.

grep 404 *.*

You will now see a large printout that contains many lines of stuff that looks like the following:

html/stats/logs/ex20100727000001-97.74.24.35.log:208.115.111.249 – - [26/Jul/2010:22:43:16 -0700] “GET www.chriskdesigns.com/2009/04/08/death-of-a-medium/ HTTP/1.1″ 404 16804 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (com
patible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/, crawler@dotnetdotcom.org)”

That’s a request to your site that ended in a 404 – File Not found. The important parts are:
The URL the person tried to visit

www.chriskdesigns.com/2009/04/08/death-of-a-medium/

The HTTP Request version and the result (a 404 here)

HTTP/1.1″ 404

So now I know that this page is missing…was I aware of this before? If you have been to my site before you might recognize this as a valid post called ‘Death of a Medium‘. So why the 404? I had changed my Permalink structure at one point in time. If someone links to your previous Permalink Structure, after you change it will result in a 404. This is why I suggest setting your Permalink structure upon setup, and not changing. I learned my lesson the hard way.

Why is it good to know these 404′s? If you have change anything about your Permalinks, spelling in a title after it’s published, or a tag/category has been removed, you can use your 404 errors to see where the problems are and possibly correct them with a .htaccess redirect.

The Solution

So now we know how to see our 404 errors, but how do we correct them? If you are using an Apache based web server, you can use a .htaccess file to redirect people accordingly. Here are a few common .htaccess redirects that I find useful for WordPress users.

Redirect from domain.com/blog to just domain.com

rewriterule ^previous-folder-name(.*)$ “http\:\/\/your-domain-here\/$1″ [R=301,L]

Modified a Post/Page Title (note: only pertains to what is after domain.com/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /.*mispelled-url-without-domain.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)helicoper(.*)$ /$1correctly-spelled-url-without=domain$2 [R=301,L]

Monetize
Something else you can do with your 404 page is monetize it. I know, sounds a little odd but it’s becoming more common in this world of backlinks. If you blog on a specific topic or a series of topics, you can setup an Amazon Associates Store and paste that code into the 404.php file of your theme. This will allow you to possibly make some money from those missed pages, and hopefully keep your visitors engaged in your site.

Humor
One of my favorite use of the 404 is humor. Here’s an article that someone wrote, listing their favorite 100 examples of humor used in a 404 page.

WordPress Comments Checker – Install Comments Checker
I hate getting emails that I have new comments. Just seems annoying. I also hate missing a comment left by someone looking for support on the Updated Today Plugin. Yeah, it’s a contradiction, I get that. Well, this plugin solves the issues. You give it a blog URL and a refresh interval, and It’ll notify you of comments. Downfall is, it only works for 1 WordPress install.

Diggio Web Highlighter and Bookmark – Install Diggio
This great extension allows you to highlight test on a site, and find it quickly at a later time. Have a great quote in a huge document you found? Perfect, just highlight it, and a little tooltip will say “Highlight”. Now, when you go back to this page later, you’ll have this highlight already available to find. Also, this can sync with the Diggio website, so by using your Google login credentials, you’ll be able to see a list of all your highlights in one spot. Great for finding that long lost bit of information you know you read somewhere.

After the Deadline – Install After the Deadline
Browsers these days all have built in spell check. I know that we all don’t care that much about our spelling, but it’s nice to have a post go out with no errors…every once and a while. Well, After the Deadline is a pretty full featured spell check and grammar check. The authors go as far as to say it’s “An intelligent spell, style, and grammar checker.” My favorite feature is that it will prompt you prior to submitting a post, or any form data for that matter, when errors are found. If you are ok with the “errors” just click OK, and your post is on the way, or you can cancel and go back and fix the problems.

Categories

WordPress includes Categories and Tags, which you can think of a type of folder system for your posts. When you file your documents away, you typically do so in a format that makes it easier to find things later. To ease this you try and keep as few folders as possible, while still allowing there to be an even break down. It might look something like the following:

This would be a pretty typical folder structure. Now within that folder you will have files. These files are what WordPress would consider Posts. Having a well defined category list is like having a good filing system, when someone wants to find something they will have a very good idea where to look. Since your product is your writing, making it easy to find will help increase your visitors.

A great way to build a good subset of categories is to, before you do a large number of posts, head on over to the ‘Categories’  option of the Posts menu of the WordPress administration area. From here you can create your primary categories and create subcategories (like folders within folders) to better narrow down your content placement.

Tags

So what are these tags I mentioned in the title? Tags are a great way to get users to explore your site. While a post should only have one category assigned to it, you should apply as many tags as are relevant (within reason of course). Tags allow WordPress to create a ‘Related Posts’ section on some themes. This will put a list of posts, with the same tags as the currently viewed article, that contain the same tags. These posts may not have the same category assigned, but their tag can link them together. Sound confusing? Let me break it down a little:

Let’s say you are a food blogger (very common recently). You have 3 categories of Recipes, How-To, and Restaurants. You just wrote a post about a local Italian restaurant that had an excellent wine selection. You also just wrote another post about how to pair wine with your food. In this case, one of these will be under ‘Restaurants’ and the other under ‘How-To’ but wouldn’t these be somewhat related to wine? That’s right, tag it with ‘Wine’. Now, visitors can see your restaurant review, find your tags, click on the ‘Wine’ tag and see all posts (no matter what the category) related to wine. It’s a broader view of your content than just Categories. You’ll see this often used on my blog and how it will help visitors explore your content further.

Essentially Tags are ‘meta’ data. Meta is data about data. Redundant as it may seem, you are used to this. It’s the same as your artist, song, genre, album and other tags for your music. The tags help define, in a short method, the content of your post. To achieve the related posts section of my pages, I use the WordPress Related Posts plugin.

I hope that will shed some light on the difference between Categories and Tags.

For some good reading over at WordPress.com about Categories vs. Tags, follow the link.