Songs From The Wood

No, not a new life for me, but for my online presence. For the past few months I’ve been meaning to switch from my blogger site to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Why, you ask. Well, I was not happy to have the blog and pictures be present at two different locations. It made for a different look, there was no simple way to link from the blog to the pictures and back, I loved the look and choices afforded by WordPress, WordPress is free software and I love and support free software, as I posted more and more videos, I’d run into the space constraints imposed by blogger. The list goes on and on.

But I was in a bind. I have loyal readers and I didn’t want them to have to face any hiccups because of the move. I didn’t want half my articles in one place and the other half elsewhere. I also have a decent presence with many of my articles showing up on the first two pages or so of Google’s search for many of the topics that I’ve written about. I would be silly to lose that.

Then, I ran into this brilliant article on a site called Digital Inspiration, courtesy of a wonderful blog, Lifehacker. This article explained in simple steps how I could move my blog from blogger to a self-hosted WordPress version without incurring any of the problems that I worried about. The whole thing was so simply explained that I was done moving my blog to WordPress with all the old articles intact in about 15 minutes. I checked to see if by visiting the old blog site, I’d automatically be redirected to the new site and I was. I found a theme that blended well with the gallery theme and installed that too. Happy, I tore myself away from the computer and went about the rest of my day.

That night, as I was putting Maya to sleep, I managed to put myself to sleep too. When that happens, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and stay up for a couple of hours before going back to bed. I plonked in front of the computer and proceeded to test if the search results would also automatically be directed to my new site. Horror of horrors, it did not. I ran into the dreaded “Page not found” error. I was wide awake now, at 2 am, in a mild state of panic. I went back and read the article again. I noticed that there was a particular phrase that the author had used which I had not paid attention to.

Most people using WordPress change the format of what is called a permalink. The default format is widely considered to be ugly and most replace it with a well-regarded format. I had not done that. The author assumed that either the reader knew how to do it or had already done it. Nowhere in his thorough article did he mention this point. Figuring out how to fix that took me a little while. When that was done, the sun was shining again at 3 am.

This only goes to show that when an article is as thorough and detailed as the Digital Inspiration article, it is important to list just about everything. One small assumption and idiots like me will slip through the cracks.

Anyways, all’s well now. If you visit the site somewhat regularly, please take a moment to let me know if you like the new look and feel.