How to Botch a Blog Transition—In Other Words, Help!
April 24, 2006
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Technical Functions : Trackback,
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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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First a color word - not sure if it’s intentional, but a lot of text is showing up red, which is sort of painful. The blue background filling the page is also sort of distracting, something milder would likely be better.
On the links, I suspect there isn’t a good solution. I’ve never done a transition from blogger to wordpress so I’m no expert on the matter, but I tend to think there probably isn’t an easy solution to this.
Keep playing with things. Worse case scenario, purge your WordPress database and set it up again then re-import everything from Blogger. Won’t hurt to play with it like that for a bit.
I feel your pain about announcing the link early. For working on the layout in private, perhaps you could set up another WordPress blog under a sub-directory, something like ceruleansanctum.com/testblog/ and get everything looking the way you want it, then transfer the layout to the live site when you are happy with it.
Regarding the links, if you have the entire blog on your computer somewhere (rather than just out on other servers) and if you can get your hands on some major web-editiing software like Dreamweaver, it can search your site and automate a lot of the corrections. That’s a big if, I know.
Also, when I clicked in this comment box it turned dark gray. The text is black. I can barely see what I’m writing. (This is with a Macintosh Safari browser.)
I’m praying for you—this kind of stuff is no fun.
I recently moved my Wordpress blog to a new domain, and like you I learned a lot in the process.
1. When you are ready, you can set up a permanent redirect to send visitors to the new URL, even to the correct post (if you can solve the post name problem). According to my understanding, using a permanent redirect should maintain your search engine ranking. Here is a good article about 301 redirects.
2. If you can figure out exactly how blogger truncates the title to form the url, then perhaps you could use regex to perform some magic on your urls. I am not an expert in this, but if you simply need to chop out all the articles, then I’m sure that there is a way to do it. As I understand it, you want to change all the internal url references in the database to point to the correct new url for your articles. So it is a one time operation, which you would like to automate if possible. Maybe some regex/SQL guru could help you out here.
I enjoy reading your blog. Good luck on solving your transition problems!
Hey, Dan. The new layout looks great! Hey, some of us were talking about you at that old site that you used to frequent. It is a thread in the general area about where some of the old posters have gone. People were saying that they missed and were wondering where you have gone. I thought maybe you might want to pop in and say hi.
-KIR-
Dan, it look beautiful! Whatever the difficulties you have encountered, the end result is simply marvelous.
ooh! it’s pretty! Great job!
[...] I will also open up a new site which will run with more the format of what this site used to be. Posts may not be that frequent, I’ll try to focus on quality posts rather than putting up any fleeting thought that comes to mind. I want to work on honing my writing, and a blog can be as good a place for that as any. I’m not going to announce the name or URL yet (I’m learning from other people’s mistakes) but when it’s ready I’ll announce the news on here. Trackback URL: http://www.musterion.net/2006/.....trackback/ Post a comment. cauthor = 0; cemail = 0; curl = 0; ccomment = 0; function cmtclearsearch(elm) { if ((elm == “author” && cauthor == 0) || (elm == “email” && cemail == 0) || (elm == “url” && curl == 0) || (elm == “comment” && ccomment == 0)) { document.getElementById(elm).value=”"; if (elm == “author”) { cauthor = 1; } else if (elm == “email”) { cemail = 1; } else if (elm == “url”) { curl = 1; } else if (elm == “comment”) { ccomment = 1; } } } function cmtchecksearch(elm) { if (document.getElementById(elm).value == “”) { if (elm == “author”) { document.getElementById(elm).value = “Your Name”; cauthor = 0; } else if (elm == “email”) { document.getElementById(elm).value = “Your Email Address”; cemail = 0; } else if (elm == “url”) { document.getElementById(elm).value = “Your Website URL”; curl = 0; } else if (elm == “comment”) { document.getElementById(elm).value = “Your comment goes here.”; ccomment = 0; } } } [...]