It would be funny if I hadn’t lived through it.
When I first started thinking about moving Learning Corporate Finance from its original home I didn’t think the move would take more than two weeks. A week to pack up, research a good SEO optimized name, another to regroup, redploy and redirect. A quick dry run with a dummy blog showed that redirection was mostly trivial and once that chapter was behind us, there wasn’t really any sense in delaying the move any further. Two weeks and six aborted and failed moves later, I am barely able to walk and stand up and more or less ready to shoot the first person who says that redirecting a blog is a trivial exercise. (Not if you are a 40 year old has been wannabe techno geek).
The good news is that I now know more than what I ever needed to know about:
- Yahoo webhosting (not recommended – their online support is a sorry excuse). Great product but really disappointed by their offline support.
- PhpmyAdmin, (#1045, access denied to root@localhost, you know what I am saying), but at times my only hope.
- Hacking wordpress blogs (did you know that the right redirect directive will shut you out permanently leaving you with a broken redirect and an inaccessible site)
- Redirecting wordpress without using a .htaccess file (3 weeks to find the right notes by which time I had been to the depths of yahoo despair and back)
- Blowing up your primary source of online sales and Adsense advertising at the stroke of midnight (my most recent moment of self discovery when I discovered religion and incompetence in short order)
- And then resurrecting the same within the next four hour before the world discovers what you have done (it was a photo finish)
Here is what I learnt after burning a few years of my life in the last two weeks.
- Export your posts and pages and dump the theme
- Import your posts and pages in your new home
- Read the guide to redirection – the only post you need to read
- Deploy the Redirection and Search Regex plugin by UrbanGiraffe to your WordPress installation
Follow directions in (c). If you want to light up the fire, go give it a spin…