WayneJohn.com is Migrating From BlogEngine to WordPress

Sometime this week I’m migrating this blog from BlogEngine to WordPress. It’s been given a lot of thought, and I’ve spent many hours pondering the pro’s and con’s of migrating from one platform to the other.

There are a few things that really made the decision for me, and I thought I would share those decision points with everyone in another post. In this post, I simply want to make everyone aware of the impending migration and point out a few things I’ve discovered since I’ve made the decision to migrate.

The perfect migration scenario is one where you see my old site and hit refresh only to be looking at a completely different blogging platform. That can’t happen in this case, so there will be some point at which WayneJohn.com will go down and then come back up with a new theme, and running on a completely different platform. I hope to get the downtime to under 10 minutes, but I’ll be at the mercy of a [dns] propagation, which is really out of my control.

Migration Issues

Nothing ever goes smoothly it seems. There could be a number of things to make the move impossibly hard, but thankfully it isn’t going to be as rough as you might think.

Here are the high level items that I’ll need to address as part of the migration.

• DNS Changes - I’ll be moving to a new host, so when you type in waynejohn.com, you’ll go to my new host for the blog. These changes can take up to 24 hours, but normally they happen within an hour.
• Links and Redirects – I want to make sure that all my links remain valid and I don’t lose all my hard work with the search engines, and any links visitors may have created. Also, I want to maintain the level of link love you all have contributed to yourselves by way of commenting here.
• Subscriptions – I want to make sure that all my subscribers (I hit 200 the other day!!! Wow!) are still able to continue as if nothing ever happened.
• The migration itself! - How in the world do you migrate a year and a half worth of posts and comments? It’s not that hard, but it isn’t perfect either. There will be issues I’ll have to address before, during and after the migration.

Taking advantage of an opportunity

Since I’m going to be uprooting my site and planting it on another server, I might as well take some time to look at the site with a critical eye and try to improve it a little bit more than I have been able to in the past. Here are a few things I want to ensure are done during the migration:

• Implement a new linking structure – I have the ability to define the link structure a bit better with WordPress, so I’ll be taking advantage of that as well. How will I do this without breaking all those links floating around the Internet? Stay tuned for that one. It’s easy and complicated all in one. Isn’t that nice.
• New theme - The number of great looking WordPress themes out there is amazing. It isn’t hard to find a good one, and it’s easy to implement themes as well.
• Minimal Downtime - As an exercise for myself, and to document the process so others can perform a migration with as much efficiency as I can find, I’ll be actively trying to minimize the number of minutes my blog will be dark.
• New Category Structure – I’m also going to take this opportunity to define a new category structure. The category structure I have now is mediocre at best.
• New Pages - I’ll create a few new pages as well as remove some of my existing pages.

After the migration

After the migration, I’ll be busy doing even more work on the site. I’ll want to check each and every page to ensure everything looks good and the content is being presented how I intend.

At this point in the life of my blog, I know which pages are hit the most, I’ll take care of those first. After I address those core pages, I’ll then move on to address each and every remaining page.

I’ll also be working a little on the new theme after the migration. So after the move you’ll notice little changes here and there for perhaps the next few weeks.

Every little thing is going to be alright

While I’m preparing the big “How To” post, I’ll share more about why I’m doing this and how to address concerns that each and every blogger will have if migrating is in the stars for them.

Migrating from BlogEngine to WordPress isn’t trivial, and I ran into several issues during the migration testing that I’ve been performing. I’ve addressed each issue and created a migration path that works well and keeps my site outage to an acceptable timeframe.

I’m incredibly excited about the move and I’m looking forward to making the move. However, I’m not so excited that I’m just going to “do it”. I’ve worked too hard to just do it without addressing all the above issues and maintaining.

Many of the issues I’ll address will be relevant to any blogger that is looking to migrate from one platform to another. If that is you, please check back in the coming days for more info regarding my move, and look out for my big “how to” post! You can also subscribe to my blog, which in my humble opinion, is the best option for keeping up with my exploits in web development, blogging and making money.

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