After the recent arrival of WordPress 2.1 I decided it’s time to move my tiny web presence to a real host (as opposed to self-hosting on my home DSL line which I did ever since 2001).

Installing WordPress went fine (as usual). But I could find a way to migrate my content over from the old box. The new WordPress version has a new database schema, so I couldn’t just import the raw SQL.

As usual, the answer is just as far away as a quick Google search, and again I am amazed by the timeliness of the solutions the open-source world creates. I found Aaron Brazell‘s “WordPress-to-WordPress Import” plugin. For me, the most important aspect was the export part – I installed the plugin on the old box and exported the content to a WXR file (WordPress eXtended RSS). This is the format the new 2.1 version of WordPress uses, and I was able to upload that file to my new installation and get it imported.