Okay, okay…so updating my blog server took longer than I’d anticipated. Getting the old material out of Community Server into BlogML format turned out to be a lot easier than I’d thought and finding the time to get it all imported into WordPress wasn’t much harder. What tripped me up was getting all of the redirection for the old, legacy URLs working.
Community Server and WordPress store their content in very different ways, and so they generate the URLs for blog posts using different algorithms. I know there are a fairish number of links out there in blog land to various posts I’ve done, and for vanity sake, I’d rather not orphan those links to the dreaded 404 not found error. The solution was to find the time to buy the lastest edition of O’Reilly’s Apache Cookbook and bone up on the Apache web server directives.
So, I think all the relevant old URLs should now automatically redirect to their proper new places — there’s not much point in keeping all the old posts if you don’t do this. The nice thing, for those of you who are web geeks, is that I’m issuing permanent redirections so Google and other search engines will update their links as they re-trawl my web site, thus pointing to the new URLs. For those of you who are humans, you might want to take a minute to check your bookmarks and make sure they’re updated to the new links.
One note: some commenter data didn’t make the import successfully. I could probably dig into it and find out why, but frankly, at this point, it’s more important to get the site (and Steph’s blog) back up and running. So, sorry — if you were one of those commenters, I apologize. Future comments should be preserved properly, and I really don’t see moving away from WordPress anytime soon.
If you’re reading this, then the necessary DNS updates have finished rolling out and we’re back live to the world. Thanks for your patience!
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