My plan to move this blog to WordPress is now close to completion.
The big test today worked without problem – importing all the content from this blog into NevOn 2.0, my new WordPress blog. Some 1,300 posts, 1,650 comments and 775 trackbacks since I started this blog in July 2004, all contained in a TypePad export file of about 5.5 megs. That’s regarded as quite a big file for importing, yet all went very smoothly indeed.
The major issue I need to deal with now concerns maintaining all the addresses – the permalinks – of each post originally created in this blog so that they all work correctly in the new place and that anyone who has bookmarked a particular post doesn’t get a 404 error after the migration. I’m reasonably optimistic about that, even though there are some fundamental differences between how TypePad and WordPress create permalinks. But there is copious help in the WordPress codex and other resources.
Once I’ve sorted that out, and a couple of other things, then I’ll be making the final changeover – re-mapping my domain (www.nevon.net) to the new WordPress blog and reverting this TypePad blog to its original underlying address (nevon.typepad.com). So the new blog will then have the same address as this current TypePad blog – no need to change any bookmarks, favorites, etc.
Although I’ve made the decision to use WordPress for my primary blog, I’m also using Movable Type for my secondary blog – NevOn 2.0 Experimental. That blog was originally on TypePad but I imported it all into the new MT blog a week ago. This lets me keep my hand in, so to speak, with two major blog platforms.
I hope to complete the final move by the end of November, certainly no later than during December. Between now and then, I’ll continue developing the new WordPress blog with additional content – one of the things I like a great deal about WordPress is that you can easily include non-blog content as an integral part of the blog.
Until then, I will continue writing regularly in this blog.
Damn good decision… one you won’t regret!