Moving a WordPress Install to a New Domain

March 26, 2025 | Comment

Over the years in both my professional and personal lives I have had to move WordPress sites to new homes that required changing the domains. This has led me to develop a set of instructions that I use successfully every time I migrate.

The first warning I should give is that what follows is not the only things you have to do but it is a decent starting point.

Updating the Database

The second warning is that here be dragons. The following requires making direct changes to the WordPress database which could lead to your site no longer working. … Read the rest

The Evolution of Databases

January 10, 2014 | 1 comment

iStock_000016066249XLarge One of the beauties of a long career is that you get to see how things in your sector evolve over time. Being in IT is no different other than the phenomenal rate of change.

Nowhere is this more evident than in databases. When I started out in the late eighties I was a COBOL programmer working on hierarchical databases and specifically IDMSX on ICL’s VME platform. These databases worked on the basis of linked lists and you had to “walk” through a whole chain in order to get to the record you wanted.

Hierarchical databases were straightforward to learn … Read the rest

Querying the Skype SQL Database

October 2, 2009 | Comment

I discovered recently that the latest version of Skype (v4) now holds all users session data, such as your chats, in a SQL database. What’s more it is easy to write queries using standard SQL to query the database and extract data. Here I’ll show you how.

Skype uses SQLite as its database engine and you can get a free tool called SQLite Database Browser to query the data (see picture below) which is held (in Windows) at the following location:

%appdata%/Skype/<username>/main.db

It is important to note that Skype MUST be closed before you can open the database.

Skype presents … Read the rest