From Website to Blog (Part 3)

Time to continue the series about transforming a website into a blog. In Part 1 we discussed the reasons for and against changing a website into a blog and in Part 2 we discussed the initial steps for moving from a site to a blog, which included backing up the existing site and preparing a sitemap. Now let's look at how we keep the old site alive while we dick around configure the new blog and what blogging platform we should be using for the blog.

Two Ways To Keep The Old Site Alive

By doing a backup of your site and creating a sitemap, you've ensured that you can quickly restore things if you royally screw things up. It may take you a while to get the new blog configured properly, though, so you want to keep the old site alive and around while that happens. There are two approaches I recommend.

Approach 1: The Temporary Site

This approach requires you to spend a bit of money, but it's the cleanest way. Acquire a second domain, host it somewhere, and put a duplicate of your original site on the new domain. Ideally you can do this just by copying up the files from your backup copy of the site. If you use relative references in your internal links — in other words, the links to the pages/images on your site don't include the domain name — then the site should just work. If you use absolute links, however, things may break on the new site once you take the content off the old site. And of course, the traffic's all going to the old site anyhow.

The way you fix both of these problems is by redirecting traffic from the old site to the new site. The easiest way to do this is with a .htaccess file on the old server:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   ^/(.*)  http://newserver/$1  [R=302,L]

The key to this rule, though, is to use a 302 redirect instead of the usual 301 redirect. The “302″ code is the “moved temporarily” code, while “301″ is the “moved permanently” code. At some point we're going to want people to go back to the old site, so we make sure the redirections are temporary.

Approach 2: Co-existence

The other approach is to have the website and the blog coexist on the same server. This may be easier than you think. Remember last time how I mentioned that the files on the site probably end in “.html”, “.htm” or “.php” and that the equivalent blog pages wouldn't have those extensions? You will ultimately want to redirect the former to the latter, but only as a last step. In the meantime you can just let the old files site around and get accessed while you get the blog up and running around it.

The only trick with this is the home page, because normally the blog's going to take over the home page, and if people come to your home page they'll get into the blog and perhaps be all confused.

Rather than get all technical, I recommend a simple approach. Use WordPress 2.1's static home page feature and quickly whip up a very simple home page that consists of nothing but links to the non-blog parts of the site. I'll show you how to do that next time.

Which Blogging Software?

Well, you can guess by now. I recommend you use WordPress 2.1 as your blogging platform. You'll find the static home page feature and the various plugins and themes that are available to be invaluable in transforming your site into a blog.

But I'm out of time today, so we'll discuss the blog setup next time…

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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