Anatomy of a Blog Move – Part III

Continued from Part I and Part II…

Before I made this leap of faith, I was definitely anxious. I've noticed patterns in my life when I take on something new and become apprehensive, then go through several phases, culminating in a long stretch of comfortability. If I stay in that zone too long, it becomes hard to jump out again, which is why I like continuing to move — it's anti-stagnation.

One of the sheer ironies that occurred as I was moving my blog was that many of my visitors saw the new site @ TORLEY.COM before me, after I changed nameservers. This is prolly 'cause my ISP has slow DNS servers. Solution? I googled and found out about OpenDNS. It literally took me a minute to setup and get on the same page (heh heh) as just about everyone else. Useful tool in case you keep refreshing your site in hopes it'll show the correct status at its new home. But for a couple of days there, I was in the dark, and frustrated as to what was going on. I also recommend Anonymouse to get an independent view of your site, as seen through the "eyes" of an anonymous proxy.

After I completed the DreamHost signup form, I had to jump through an additional hoop I didn't read about beforehand: apparently due to credit card fraud, they ask you to fax in a signed agreement, complete with crayon or pencil rubbing of your credit card. It took some time but I understand they have to protect their business!

WordPress setup itself was really simple, just like they advertise. The installation process is detailed here. After that, I wanted to get started making changes right away, but since my DNS hadn't propagated yet, following these instructions, I setup torley.dreamhosters.com as a mirror. It was a little confusing, first time I've done it, but it ultimately helped me get up and rolling.

Good preparation is important: beforehand, I was certain to be organized and keep all my former blog's exported RSS files in a single folder on my hard drive, so I could easily upload them into WordPress. I also backed up files residing on the old filespace, and ported them to their new home here. I have a lot more potential storage capacity: 200 GB vs. 100 MB. That's like, 2000 times more (!). Please let me know of any broken links!

Searching this blog should also be better. It shows full entries for now, I can play with that later. I'm also going to investigate the WordPress Related Entries plugin. I haven't moved my Google search module over, and it may be supplanted in favor of their new Custom Service Engine.

Still lots to do, I'm really pleased with how commenting looks here: you may have noticed it's alternating watermelon colors, with an almost tip-of-the-hat to olde Paris in the header where it shows the commenter's name and #.

More style tw3@k@g3 to follow, no doubt!

Tagged as: Blog Improvements, General