A couple of months ago, I started using Posterous in hopes of posting from my phone as well as posting pictures. This service not only creates a blog, it will post to other blogs/services you use. This is where I ran into trouble. Posts were being garbled and HTML tags were being stripped on this site while the same posts were appearing flawlessly elsewhere.
After some considerable research, I was able to determine that the cause of the problem was due to out-of-date components in PHP4 that my host was running. I tried a few of the workarounds that are available but none were successful – mostly because I do not have root access to my host’s server (it’s in a shared environment).
I decided to go back at it today and found an option to enable PHP5 in my hosting service control panel. This is where things got scary. Once I enabled PHP5 and created a new database, I no longer had access to the PHP4 database via phpMyAdmin. This was turning into a nightmare.
Luckily there is an option to export blog contents in the WordPress Admin Dashboard. I did this and then re-mapped my WordPress install to the new PHP5 database and crossed my fingers. I attempted to login by accessing the wp-login.php file and was re-directed to a re-install of WordPress which went flawlessly. I went back to the Dashboard and imported the PHP4 backup and everything fell right into place. I had to make a few fine adjustments to the theme (but that’s due to the theme and it’s unique features).
Everything now appears to be running smoothly. Wish Posterous’ Autopost feature was a bit more intuitive, but I’ve also got that figured out.
