How to move a blog, part 2 (series)

Let's continue our discussion about moving blogs. In Part 1, we discussed making backups of postings. I should have mentioned, though, that you can often export postings from a blog suitable for import into different blogging software. How you do it depends on the software. The software I use, blojsom (more about it below) has a plugin to import postings from a syndicated feed. See what your software supports. Whatever you do, make sure your postings are backed up somewhere. (I once had to go fishing my postings out of Google's cache due to a system crash between backups, and that wasn't fun.)

The next step in the move is to get the new blogging platform configured the way you want it. (Note that we're not just talking about upgrading your current blogging software to a new version… we're talking about moving your blog from one domain to another.) If you're moving from a hosted environment like Blogger, there will be a lot of setup to do that you haven't had to do before. It's much better to do this before you go “live” with the blog. One of the first things you should do is turn off the blogging software's pinging support. You'll be creating dummy entries as you try different things in your configuration, and you don't want services like Technorati to come sniffing around until you're ready for them. Remember, no one's going to discover your blog by accident until you start publicizing it. So this is your chance to test things out without worrying about messing things up.

About blojsom

I've had some interesting comments about the blogging software I use, which is blojsom. Someone wondered why I was using “this weird platform”. It's not so weird, trust me. Apple actually uses it as the basis for one of their server products. It's open source, just like WordPress. But it's written in Java, not PHP, which is why I like it. I've just been slow to upgrade it and fix it up… that's my fault, not the platform's. But I just silently upgraded it to the latest version this morning as the first step in my blog move.

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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