Blog Transferring Ordeal
I Eat Games is now running under its own domain name with a tweaked version of Brian Gardner’s Eye Candy theme. As I
said before, messing around with code was hard enough. Actually, I thought that would be my biggest headache. Of course, that in itself was wishful thinking. How wishful? Transferring a blog from Wordpress.com is almost painful, even when going to a hosted Wordpress(.org) website, as I was soon to learn.
First, the nifty “import” tool on the Wordpress.org hosted blogs doesn’t include wordpress.com sites. I wonder what the reason for this is. Actually, now I wonder. At the time I was trying to import all of my posts, I was too busy wrinkling my nose at the XML file that I had to download from Wordpress.com to upload to Wordpress.org.
Second, all of my categories were MIA. That wouldn’t have been so bad in itself had each post somehow acquired a category of its own. And then some. That’s right, for my 35 post blog, I managed to acquire 150 or so categories. That may have had something to do with the comments that were on my blog. Which leads me to my next point.
I have no inkling as to how to transfer my comments. Some posts, like the one I wrote asking for help on finding a passable Multi-Man Online RPG, had six or more comments. Those are now all gone due to my incompetence.
Furthermore, I now have to tell everyone who’s linked to me to change their links. Which, I suppose, was my fault in the first place, since I decided to test the waters on a Wordpress.com blog before changing to .org.
I do believe that Wordpress.com is a wonderful free blog provider, and it outshines many others like it. I just had a hard time moving themes over.
Oh. As for the new (temporary) look for Heartfulls — I decided to go with unsleepable because it’s a smexy theme. And leaving it unfinished will make me finish it tweaking the begeezus out of a different theme. If that makes any sense at all.
Posted on January 12th, 2007 by Joy
Filed under: Blogging, Video Game
Place a 301 redirect on your host file. That will tell all the browsers, searche engines included that this page has permanently moved and needs to be redirected to a new page.
You can also use a meta redirect which is similar to a 301 only less supported by search engines.
That is if you haven’t already removed the existing site…
Why so many categories, 150 sounds rediculous for a gaming site. Are they all relevant? Did you back up your MySQL database before deleting your account - does Wordpress.com even give you acccess to the database? - as you can just run a simple query to post the comments, posts and pages across.
Hope this helps. Changing sites sucks, keep the .com as you can now just DNS redirect or play with your robots.txt and .htacess file. I suspect you have a few terms to look up and learn now. Bye!
Hi Michael,
I only had 12 categories, but when I transferred them, WP gave one category to each post and picture, and then some. So now it’s down to 12. Thanks for all of help. ^_^
You lost me at hello.
nya.
Yes, dear Rylan, that was the point. To totally get *you* confused. Hehe.
I need to switch over to paid blogs also. I have too many free blogs on Wordpress.com, that really should have their own domain. Hmm I wonder if you can do a 301 redirect on wordpress.com, that would be great. Thanks for the info Joy and Michael.
Too bad you can not transfer PR when you move your site, that would be sweet. Are you going to do any Google Ads or other advertising options?
On I Eat Games, I use Amazon Associates as a way to monetize. I don’t think I’ll use Adsense, but I might look into more affiliate marketing types of things. I could still add a sidebar to my theme, after all.
I think you can do domain mapping on wordpress.com, too. Thanks for coming by!