Yes, once again we’re playing with my very own meme. Will it catch on? I don’t care.
Six of the Best Things about Migrating My Blog
I like it. Mm hm.
Professional strength! I just feel like I really mean it now that I’m on my own domain and using WordPress.
FeedBurner. My handful of RSS subscribers (hi guys!) won’t have to update their subscriptions. Thank you, FeedBurner.
Blogger RSS Import. This handy WordPress plugin made it SOOOO easy to migrate. In fact, I was so excited that it was going to be so easy (after reading the scariest, most convoluted methods to import) that I jumped the gun and went live on mamablogga.com a little ahead of schedule. (Note that the site is a little touch-and-go; keep trying, you’ll get it.)
Learning. Switching has been a learning experience: I got to dabble in lots of things and experiment in a lot more. To be honest, although I work in a highly technical field, I don’t have very much technical knowledge in webmastering, etc. I knew how to register domains and sign up for hosting, bu I didn’t know how to go from there to a “real” website. I feel a lot more competent. Now I’ve played with 301 redirects, Apache, PHP, MySQL and more.
Get down to business. I’ve been meaning to use my search engine marketing knowledge to start driving more traffic to my blog (though I haven’t decided on if/how I’ll do advertising). I’ve had all these ideas for linkbait and fun features, but I kept saying, “No, wait till you’re on your own domain. You don’t want to have to try to change all those links.” Guess what, I’m here!
Six of the Reasons I Should Have Waited a Little Longer
Style. I still have a few things to update, including a few minor changes to my stylesheet (like changing bulleted lists to show footprints instead of bullets… I think it’s cute; do you?)
Moving links. I’ve moved Technorati, MyBlogLog and I’m e-mailing the few people who’ve linked to my site to get the links fixed.
Moving internal links. I’ll have to go through and change all of my internal links in old posts.
Moving pictures. I’m told that once it registers with Blogger that I’ve “stolen” my old pictures, they’ll stop displaying them. So I’ll have to update all those, too. Sheesh.
Customizing. I meant to hold off on migrating until I made sure I had all the bugs worked out. I got a little over excited and jumped the gun there.
Brain melt. I really like the background color, but I’m scared it’s going to melt people’s brains.
So yeah, I jumped the gun a little, but I’m still pretty excited.