Wiping the Slate Clean

07.25.2010

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Lately I’ve been putting more thought into wiping the slate clean with this blog and starting anew. If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you might remember that I toyed with the idea of moving to Expression Engine because it’s what we use to drive MPOW’s web site, and learning the ins and outs of the system would make it easier for me to support it in the long run. That project stalled because I didn’t have the technical skills and PHP chops to export all of my WordPress entries and pull them into EE with the URLs, categories, tags, and media intact. I still haven’t figured that out, but I didn’t want that to be the reason I put off the project any longer.

I also don’t want to be locked into one theme framework for the life of this blog. Thesis has served me well but because of the way I use the framework to associate images with blog posts, I’d have to do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make sure that the images would still show up in any new theme I used. A daunting prospect for someone who doesn’t have programming and/or WordPress chops.

What I’m thinking is that I’ll move all of the content here to a subdomain (most likely archives.cecily.info) and start with a new DB, a fresh EE install, and a new look and feel. I’d like to be able to do this before the summer is over, but seeing as how it’s already July 25, I don’t know how realistic that is. I’d also like not to lose any search engine juice, but I’m not exactly sure what I need to do to make sure than any URLs that are currently here redirect to the new subdomain. If anyone has any tips on that, I’d love to hear them.

Every once in awhile it’s good to shake things up, to push yourself past the limits of what is familiar and comfortable. Or so I’ve heard.

  • http://jbrotherlove.com jbrotherlove

    I'm excited about this! I had a sidebar with Brandon about EE that has me itching to use it on a personal project, again. I'd taken a break while shortly after EE 2.0 and the bugs were being worked out. Now that EE 2.1 is available, I think it's time to dive back in. Probably on my [design] domain though. Good luck!

  • tiffanybbrown

    “I’d also like not to lose any search engine juice, but I’m not exactly sure what I need to do to make sure than any URLs that are currently here redirect to the new subdomain.”

    I think .htaccess will help here. Expression Engine URLs are structured differently from WordPress ones. So you would need a little bit of regular expression magic to redirect cecily.info/year/month/date URLs to archive.cecily.info/year/month/date ones. I will see if I can figure that out for you.

    Looks like there is a WordPress theme that will display WP content in MT format and allow you to import it into EE http://www.bloggingexpertise.com/plugins/wordpr

    Good luck!

  • Cecily Walker

    Thanks, J.! I like what I've seen with 2.1. I may be bending your ear
    about the differences between 1.x and 2.1. We're planning to migrate
    the work website to 2.1, and we'll need to know what to do to make
    sure we're ready for that.

  • Cecily Walker

    Thanks, tiffany!

    I'm thinking of just leaving the archives.cecily.info as a WordPress
    install to make things easier (though I'm pretty sure Dreamhost will
    hate this idea). I shouldn't have to change the structure of the URLs
    if I do that, but I will need to make sure any searches that point to
    cecily.info go to archives.cecily.info.

    Thanks for the tip on that WordPress theme. I'll look into that.

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