One of the challenges of moving a website is preserving the permalinks - links to your stuff from elsewhere on the web. This is important if you wish to retain any page rankings in the search engines as well as just keeping stuff people have linked to you working. This is a big challenge when moving something as complex as a blog site like mine from one web technology to another, e.g. from dasBlog to wordpress. You really need to do a permanent redirect, so the search engines know that the resource in question has actually moved.
What I’ve done is write a custom ASP.net website that does permanent redirects for every single one of my 650 blog posts, as well as date and category views. So links like the folllowing work:
Example of a random post:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/2007/11/13/TinySuperheroDogsFlyVeryLow.aspx
Example of a month view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/default,month,2005-09.aspx
Example of a category view:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/categoryview,category,cars.aspx
I also implemented redirect support for images that are linked to my site, so that images with URLs like this:
http://www.mikefullerton.com/blog/content/binary/jacky.jpg should be permanently redirected to http://blog.mikefullerton.com/wp-content/oldcontent/jacky.jpg. This is the only part I don’t have working yet. It works fine on my development machine at home, but barfs on the actual server. I’m not sure why yet. Binaries in wordpress are normally loaded into the mySql database, but for my old content I decided just to have a folder for the old posts.
This was a fun little project I did in one day. If you’re interested in using this redirector website, let me know. Right now it’s hand tuned to redirect dasBlog to wordpress, but that could be abstracted a bit more for another blogging engine.
More on this later. I want to post about how I actually moved the site, which was infinitely more difficult and frustrating.
Please let me know if you have any problems.
Ha, it’s the Tick!