How to Botch a Blog Transition—In Other Words, Help!
April 24, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Feedback : 8 comments
Folks,
As you know, I’m in the midst of a major blog transition. I’ve discovered a few things about my supposed wisdom of Web-based things, and that is that I have no idea what I’m doing. The problem is that one mistake leads to a cascade of others and the next thing you know you’re going over Niagara without a barrel.
I had to move this blog to a new host. That went fine! But then the mistakes started:
Mistake #1: I told people to switch to http://ceruleansanctum.com because that was the new domain name. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun on this. By handing out that domain, now everyone gets to see the Wordpress transition before I wanted people to see it. So instead of being able to work on it behind the scenes, now it’s essentially live and in a state of utter “un-setup-ness.” If I had kept quiet about that URL, I could have done things nicely. Now people have two URLs and there are links out there that are pointing to the old blog and some to the new.
Mistake #2: By exposing the new domain name early, I have redirect issues. If I put a redirect here now, then my Google ranking for the site gets hosed (and for my purposes that ranking is important to keep). Anyone who can help me understand the best way to do a redirect while maintaining a good relationship with search engines, well…I would love you forever!
Mistake #3: I hoped the Blogger import into Wordpress would be a piece of cake. Using the new Wordpress 2.0, the actual post content and commenting transition was a breeze. The files came over just by putting in my Blogger username and password into the Wordpress import feature. Presto, change-o, and Cerulean Sanctum was now in Wordpress! I added a plug-in to do universal string replacement (so I could change URLs to feature the new http://ceruleansanctum.com URL) and changed the permalink structure of the blog to mimic Blogger’s directory structure so every link would be good—or so I thought.There’s only one problem: Blogger truncates post titles to form the URL (and elminates articles) and Wordpress does not. That essentially whacks every link I have within the blog!!! Aaack!
This is what it looks like: The old Blogger permalink for the post that explains the meaning of “Cerulean Sanctum” was at: http://ceruleansanctum.com/2005/07/enigma-of-blog-title-explained-in.html
The new Wordpress import of that post is permalinked at: http://ceruleansanctum.com/2005/07/the-enigma-of-the-blog-title-explained-in-living-color/
Anyone know a way that I can fix this without having to repair every single link within every single post that referenced another post?
So that’s where I am! Help! I hope I can get the blog right within the next week, but my freelance work is keeping me busy (thankfully), so this is turning out to be a more ugly transition than I’d hoped. Thanks for hanging in there. In the end, this will be a better blog for these changes, but for a while it’s going to be a mess.
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