Learn how to create a website/blog with WordPress at the WordPress Meetup group in Cedar Rapids, IA
WordPress meetup group happens every 3rd Tuesday of each month unless otherwise noted. This event took pace on November 15th, 2016
Website migration from one server to another
Seth Adam, the owner of Dakota Softworks shows the group how to migrate a WordPress website/installation from one hosting environment to another, in this case, Digital Ocean.com. He took us through the steps one by one compressing/exporting/downloading the MySQL database to files from the original host. The beginning process starts on the original host at the cPanel, or something comparable, compressing and downloading the database, image files, and more in a zip file. For this installation, we also had to log into the IP address using Terminal on our Macintosh computer. Seth knows the line commands like the back of his hand because he’s been a programmer for so long. I would have had to look them up and hope I didn’t mess anything up. It’s one of those things in the industry that you don’t have to do every day and it becomes easy to forget. The great thing is the site was currently up and running while we were working on the IP address before we changed over the domain name servers. So really there is no stress if you mess something up. In this case, the site’s domain name server was changed over to Google Domains (also look into G Suite for company email back by Google and other business apps).
I decided to not go into extreme detail with this blog post because there are other resources out there that can step you through most of it. Digital Ocean has a great tutorial on how to migrate WordPress from a shared hosting environment to a cloud server with zero downtime that you should check out. Some steps may not apply to your migration. Also, see how to install WordPress on Ubuntu.
SWAG by Gravity Forms & Rocket Genius
I kept heckling Rocket Genius (the makers of Gravity Forms) for some SWAG (Stickers, t-shirts, or just about anything) for our WordPress group via email. I used to hit them up every month hoping that one day they would provide us with something. Needless to say, I tweeted to Rocket Genius and one of my twitter friends Jeff Matson ? @TheJeffMatson saw my tweet and hooked me and the group up with several stickers for our event. I didn’t give out all that many this time, but I have plenty of leftover SWAG for several events to come!
Now that I’m targeting more of a “learn how to create a website” crowd vs. just hardcore WordPress users, our numbers are starting to go up.
The after party
Seth, Nate, and I all went out and had Chinese for an after WordPress meeting. As always, it’s nice to hear how business is, to brainstorm on how to help the Meetup Group and to promote our own businesses as well. Nate mentioned that he loves to go to other meetups and get to know potential clients that way. Seth is more of a web dev with lots of backend programming, so most of his clients are found via online traffic. I’ve even sent him business from time to time. He, in turn, has also sent me business. We all have our strengths in the industry. Our main goal is to give our clients the best product. Something that may include hiring one of our good friends from the WordPress group.
