SOB (Same Old Blog), New Host

If you are reading this then you’ve made it over to my new blog. The key change was moving domains, from jonroemer.com/blog to blog.jonroemer.com.

While not ideal, Google will have to reindex the entire blog and many links to and from my blog will no longer work, the new platform will provide greater security and better WordPress support going forward.

If you were a subscriber to old blog you’ll need to resubscribe – there are options to subscribe via email or via RSS below this post.

If you have a link to the old blog and it’s no longer working (it won’t be) then swapping the front of the URL will get you to the same spot. Swap http://www.jonroemer.com/blog/ with http://blog.jonroemer.com/. For example, old blog > http://www.jonroemer.com/blog/2014/07/canon-16-35mm-f4l-is-usm-lens-video-test/ to new blog > http://blog.jonroemer.com/2014/07/canon-16-35mm-f4l-is-usm-lens-video-test/.

For those who are interested in what happens under the hood – my blog was a self-hosted WordPress installation provided by my website host, APhotoFolio. In the past month my blog was down for a few days for unknown reasons and while APF does provide a free WP hookup it’s not something they want to support or manage.

My first effort in moving was to test bringing the blog within WordPress.com. Which is to say, move from self-hosted to being hosted within WordPress.com. The moving part was extremely easy but once there I felt that the WordPress.com environment was too restrictive. This applied to plug-in options as well as reporting options. In particular, WordPress.com sites are not compatible with Google Analytics. That’s one thing I didn’t want to give up.

I also toyed with the idea of moving the blog to Squarespace.com, it would have been a bid for simplicity (no WP open-source snafu’s, no coding), but a test import of twenty blog posts showed lots lost in the translation from WP to Squarespace. Each blog post would have had to have been reformatted by hand after importing. I do find Squarespace’s look to be extremely clean but, for me, the sites seem to lack a certain finesse (blogs, photo portfolios) – that’s not so much a criticism as the trade-off which comes with Squarespace’s ease of use.

In the end, it made sense to stick with a self-hosted WP site and I went with WPengine.com.  As the name implies they specialize in self-hosted WordPress blogs and I think that the support and the security they provide will be worth it.

WPengine has a migration tool which looks a bit daunting to the layman but I found I could bypass it. Using WordPress’ built-in Export/Import utility from the old blog to the new one worked fine. Very easy transition overall including snazzing things up with a new WP theme.

One note: It’s helpful to use a plug-in like Search & Replace after the transfer. It allows you to clean up any internal references within your blog, posts linking to other posts (if not corrected they would still point to the old domain.) Backup before you do this! WPengine will prompt you to do backup before installing the plug-in.