OK, I guess I’d better fess up to what a clutz I am (that’s one word for it). Last week I wanted to move my blog from its own directory EngineerYourSuccess.com/blog/ to the root directory; EngineerYourSuccess.com, as the main site was built on XSitePro and didn’t match the blog. Plus, you can make WordPress look like a non-blog website anyway nowadays if you want, but still get all the flexibility and ease of WordPress through the admin and plugins.
I found a great tutorial over at Martin’s Malden’s blog WealthyDragon.com on how to do this, and how to do a redirect so that all the posts from the old blog link up to the new one. I started out well by doing a dummy run on an unimportant site first, like he suggests. It’s a good job I did too, because I did run into some issues and made a couple of silly mistakes.
Then when my brain was hurting from all the concentration and when I was tired because I had stayed up late the night before, I felt ready to do it for real on this site. Hmm. You already know what I’m going to say don’t you? (Well there are no other posts here, so it’s clear something went wrong!)
Yup, I forgot to move the existing site away from the root when I moved the blog from its own directory. I won’t go into all the niggles I had trying to rectify that, but lets just say that whatever I tried, the site was still not quite right, even after moving all the files out that did not say “today” in the “last modified” column in File Manager.
So I then had the idea to do a backup from the sql.gz file I get every week via email from a plugin I use. Except I couldn’t make 7-zip work on my PC and the only other unzipper I could find that opened .gz files was Hamster zip, which seemed to have great video tutorials, but using the software turned out to look nothing like the videos.
So then I looked around for a freelancer to do it, and was about to hire someone, when it occured to me; What if I have a problem using the site in the future? Even if it’s completely unrelated, I’d be permanently paranoid that there is a corrupt file somewhere because I tried to patch things up on an already messed up site. I also thought that one thing I am totally confident at doing is adding a completely brand new blog to a site from scratch. And I totted up the number of posts; fewer than fifty – so I decided to cut my losses and start completely from scratch.
I plan to add a lot of the old posts as I go along, although I’ll leave out the few that have out of date information. Of course many will think I’m a lunatic for starting from scratch instead of of doing a backup/restore, but this is what I’m comfortable doing. It means the site has to be empty for a while, but it’ll be worth it when it’s done.
I have all the old posts in Word docs and the images on my hard drive, so that’s ok, but I was still glad to find most of them in The Wayback Machine and on Google’s cached pages too, which I also downloaded in order to make sure the links and URLs are all correct.
But the cool thing is, I don’t have to worry about doing a redirect, because with the new blog, I have chosen to have a static page as the home page, meaning the blog has its own directory called /blog/ – the same as before.
So what did I learn from all this?
- Don’t do technical stuff you’re not experienced at, while tired.
- Do more than one dummy run of any important, new technical task.
- Have each step written or typed down, even the really baby steps you think are too obvious to write down.
- Don’t rely on those .gz file backups from plugins. Download a backup regularly direct from your server, and ESPECIALLY just before you do anything major to your site.
- Don’t rely on WordPress’ own support forum. There are some helpful guys there, but you can’t guarantee they’ll see your post. A specialist WP program or a premium theme such as Thesis also cover WP in their support.
- Find a tech freelancer (perferrably more than one) who you can rely on when needed.
So it’s ok to make mistakes as long as you learn something of value.
