I’ve finally ‘finished’ the move from Blogware to WordPress and the end result is a lot better than I’d hoped and the DNS propagation is nearly finished I think, as the site is becoming more active by the hour. I was determined to do the move on my own and I ‘almost’ managed.
It’s not something I would recommend doing unless you really want a change, but if you are keen to move then it is possible. When I’ve got time I’m going to write up a guide to moving blog hosts. Although it will focus on moving from Blogware to WordPress, some of the steps will apply to all moves regardless of platform, particularly the tricks I’ve discovered for redirecting old external links.
So far I’ve managed to:
- Transfer my domain
- Import all of my old posts
- Import about 70% of my old comments
- Import all of my old trackbacks (although I had to do them as comments and I also lost the clickthrough links which is a pity)
- Redirect all old permalinks to the old articles, categories, archives and keywords (very pleased I cracked this one!)
- Transfer my feedburner account
Outstanding items are:
- Tidying up posts as the import script lost some of the formatting (medium priority)
- Trying to work out how to redirect old searches on my blog that had been picked up by search engines (low priority)
- Missing pictures that are referencing locations on my old server (medium priority)
- Create a custom 404 page with explanations/help (high priority)
- Copy across my moblog pictures/photo albums (low priority)
I’m very happy with the new look & feel even though I haven’t had much time to tweak the template (and even sometimes access because of DNS issues) or even to look around for one that I like. Even so, I think this site has a nice fresh feel to it and I’ve already incorporated quite easily some features I couldn’t on the last blog like:
- Article reads
- Better info on who’s online. Even shows what they are reading
- Popularity (very cool as it uses views, comments and trackbacks to create a score per post)
- Most viewed
- Better search integration
I think what I will do is use this template as my experimental template and then I’ll select a new one based on what features I decide I need or want.
Anyway enjoy the site and let me know if you see any errors, or have any migration tips or plugin recommendations.
