How to move a blog, part 1 (series)

As promised, I'm starting the process of updating my blogging software to improve its reliability. I'll also install some caching options to make the pages come up more quickly. Lots of fun, geeky stuff… I hope! While I'm at it, though, I'm also going to move this blog from the MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com domain to the memwg.com domain so that Google will start serving AdSense ads to it again. Might as well do all the painful stuff at once. So I thought I'd start a little series talking about the steps required to move a blog from one domain to another, as it's something you may have to do yourself at one point. Note: this blog may go down at various points as I move it…. if it does, just check back later, it shouldn't be down for too long at any one point.

The first thing to do is decide whether or not your really want to move the blog. There are various reasons for moving a blog, but the main one is to move a blog from someone else's domain (like a Blogger-based blog on the blogspot.com domain) to your own domain. Ideally, you would have done this at the beginning, obviating the need for a move, but many first-time bloggers don't realize that there are benefits to hosting the blog on your own domain. (This doesn't mean, by the way, that you can't use Blogger. Look at my CluelessAbout site — its home page is actually a Blogger blog.) In any case, you're in my position, having to move the blog from one domain to another.

After you've decided to move the blog, there are some preparatory steps to take. The first thing is to make sure you have a backup of your current blog's postings somewhere. This is always good to have no matter what, but if you need to repost the content of those postings to the new blog then it's good to have them sitting around somewhere you can easily access. The easiest way to get those postings is from your RSS feed. If you can, switch you blogging software to place all the postings in the feed and then download the feed and store it somewhere safe. If you can't get all the postings that way, try looking through search engine caches for old feeds, sometimes you can find them. But you'll probably have to suck down the entire blog as a set of HTML pages. You can download software to do this for you.

Next we'll talk about setting up the new blog on the new domain.

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense. He's also a fan of redscowl bluesingsky.

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