PHP/Wordpress URL change broken

[Tyson Sawyer]

My wife and I recently "upgraded" our web presence.  I've had the
j3.org domain since 1996, but have never done much with other than
post a few files from time to time and routing my email through it.

We chose a hosted Wordpress service since it seems to be so well
supported, mature and have lots of plug-ins available.  The new web
site was first created under a temporary, throwaway domain name.  The
change over to our preferred domain has been a complete disaster from
the Wordpress/PHP side of things.

Wordpress seems to embed the sites URL in EVERYTHING. WTF!  What is
wrong with leaving the host name out to access the files from the
"current host"?  I admit that I've not played much with web pages
since HTML 2 or so and most of my experience is typing up very simple
pages with emacs, but is this really how it has to be done?

Here is what is potentially the worst part:  We have manually done
some searching and editing of URLs embedded in the mySQL records with
a phpAdmin tool.  I am now finding warnings online saying that some
plugins will embed the URL length in the data and simply editing the
string will break things.

I found this page, but I suspect it is for people who haven't screwed it up yet:

http://pixelentity.com/wordpress-search-replace-domain/

How screwed are we?

Thanks!
Ty

-- 
Tyson D Sawyer

A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent
of many bad measures.   - Daniel Webster