Currently most, and soon all, of the content at PlanetMike.com is related to technology and web design. So I took this opportunity to rename the site from “Michael Boyd Clark Journal/Blog” to “PlanetMike’s Technology Journal.” I am now adding new GoogleAlerts to monitor for the new name appearing in splogs (already found two!). I also tweaked the settings in my rss footer plugin.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. This allows you to read my newer articles without having to visit the site again. Thanks for visiting! Mike

Ok, I’ve moved a whole bunch of posts from PlanetMike.com over to my personal site, MichaelClark.name. While tedious, it was a pretty straightforward process.

1. Install WordPress on your new domain. Make sure it is the same version as the one on the old domain!
2. Copy the active theme to the new site’s theme directory. This should be under wp-content/themes/.
3. Copy all of your plugins to the new site’s plugins directory. This should be under wp-content/plugins/.
4. Copy the WordPress database to a new database. Ideally, make a backup of the old site’s database, and then import it into a new database. At this point you have two WordPress database set up with 100% duplicated content, users, passwords.
5. Use a mysql editor to edit the “siteurl” and “home” values in the wp_options table. I used Navicat, but you could use any mysql database editor like PHPMyAdmin or the command line.
6. Then simply edit the wp-config.php file on the new site so it can read the new database.

Tada! You now have a complete copy of your old WordPress blog on a new domain.

I took this opportunity on the new site to change my permalink structure. I removed the dates from my post’s URLs.

Important! If you have any photos, style sheets, images, included files, or other content referenced from the old site, those links won’t work on the new site until you copy or move that content over. And since I was splitting out my personal information, I had a lot of other info to move around.

My goal was to have my photos, family stuff, jokes, etc… all on my personal site. So I moved those directories to their new location. But for now I don’t want those pages to break if someone visits that URL. So I created a link from the new site to the old site. For example:
ln -s photos ../www.planetmike.com/photos


I did this for a bunch of directories. To the end user, you can’t tell that anything has changed. But I do have the same content on two domains now, which could mean a penalty at some point from search engines. The reason I had a bunch of directories is that PlanetMike.com has been around since 1997, the days before there were content management systems available.

Now another tedious step: removing duplicate content from the blogs. On the new site I went through and removed a bunch of posts and categories that will not be used there. On the old site I didn’t have to do anything with those posts, since they aren’t changing.

And the final tedious step: On the old site, look at each post in the categories for the new site. A very few of these posts could be deleted entirely, from both blogs. But most needed to be redirected to the new site. I created a list of URLs from the old site that were to be redirected to the new site. I did this by category, just to keep this in manageable chunks. A few posts I reclassified into other categories. Then in my .htaccess for the blog, I added the RewriteRule, one for each URL:
RewriteRule 2005/09/15/virginia-tech-photographs/? http://www.michaelclark.name/virginia-tech-photographs [R=301,L]


This rule says if the requested url contains 2005/09/15/virginia-tech-photographs (with an optional slash at the end), that page has been permanently redirected to http://www.michaelclark.name/virginia-tech-photographs. As I added each category’s URLs to the .htaccess file, I deleted the post from the old blog. Anyone that requests the old URL would transparently be bounced to the new site. That might be confusing to people who visit the site during the transition.

I ended up with over 270 lines in the .htaccess file. I could have used some regex (regular expression) magic, but I liked actually touching each URL. By doing each URL one at a time, I was able to basically audit the entire site.

I finished this step a week ago, and have been watching my server logs and my Google webmaster account for problems. One problem I’m seeing now is that some of my category and monthly archives had multiple pages, but since I’ve pruned the number of posts down, the highest numbered pages don’t exist any longer. I’ll be leaving that as a 404 error so that the search engines will remove that page from their indices.

I’ve made a good start on splitting out personal stuff from PlanetMike.com, and moving it to MichaelClark.name. Jokes, photo galleries, and a handful of categories from WordPress have been moved. I’m moving a few more categories today, then I’ll share some of the lessons I’ve learned. Hopefully you won’t see too many problems on any of the pages during this transition. I’m using linked directories, and apache’s rewrite rules to gracefully move content around.

I’ve said the personal posts and content from PlanetMike.com will be moved to another site. What site would that be? I’m thinking now it will be MichaelClark.name. I also have registered both MichaelClark.org and MichaelClark.net, but .name will be my “official” personal site.

If you’d like to get a glimpse as to how I’ll be doing this, simply subscribe to my personal RSS feed at http://feeds.michaelclark.name/MichaelClark.

So the first thing to do is figure out exactly what content I have to work with. For the WordPress portion of the site, that’s simple. I installed the Dagon Design Sitemap Plugin (warning - lots of spammy comments, so that site may not be managed any longer) and created a sitemap of the blog portion of PlanetMike.com.

I also simply eyeballed the site’s home page of PlanetMike.com to see how many sections of the site could be rolled over to my new personal site. It’s a lot to move over: photography, fractals, all of the Humor sections (jokes, optical illusions, and funny photographs (which may simply get deleted since I don’t think I own the copyright on any of them)). There are also a lot of my writings from before there were blogs that will be moved into the blog system. That will also make the site easier to navigate and maintain.

Ultimately my final goal is to have everything in the WordPress database. That may not be possible, but as far as I can do it I will. For example, my web traffic log reports output into shtml (server side include) files. I’d rather they were in my WordPress database. Can I copy and paste the tables and reports into a new page in WordPress? A little extra work, but that’s ok. Can I do the same thing with my Gallerie photo galleries? I think I’ll probably look around at the options available for photo management plugins for WordPress.

For years I’ve been using PlanetMike.com as my primary web site, and I post everything on it. The site started as a bunch of static web pages, then used (and still does in many places) server side includes. I’ve posted photos, jokes, other miscellaneous information. Then I started blogging, using Bloxsom, and then switched to WordPress. My category list is enormous.

Well, I am now getting ready for the next step in the evolution of the PlanetMike.com web site. I am going to move the personal stuff off of PlanetMike.com over to another domain. I want PlanetMike.com to be a site that a new blogger (or an experienced blogger) can come to to learn about technology and related issues. And obviously a lot of the content on the current site is a distraction and clutters the message that I am a professional who knows what he’s talking about. So I’m going to streamline the site, move content around (e.g. the blog will be the top level, the journal directory will be no more), and end up with two sites: one covering technology and blogging issues, and one covering me and my life.

I plan to start this process shortly after Christmas, and being finished up sometime in January. I’ll be writing about my experiences in a series of posts here on PlanetMike, since I’m sure I will learn things that others will need to learn as well. A key part of this is to not break old URLs and links, like I wrote about a few days ago in Help Your Users: Don’t Break Old URLs.

Last night I ran the webalizer traffic report for this site. I was thinking that traffic had slowed down since I last ran the report in early February. I was basically right, with about 10% fewer pages per month viewed from February to October. But I’m still very pleased with the numbers. View the reports. I haven’t done any advertising of the site. And actually only basic maintenance. I’m getting ready for a major design overhaul, and one of the first steps in doing that is knowing the details of what I already have on the site, and what people are looking at.

After last week’s PageRank update, plus because the ads were making the site look very cluttered and busy, I have decided to remove all advertising from PlanetMike.com.

I’ve been experimenting with advertising on the site since leaving my full-time webmaster gig in February, 10 months ago. I have used Google Adsense, Adbrite, Project Wonderful, and Text-Link-Ads. I did receive some money for these ads, enough that it was a bit more than chump change, but not enough that I could retire completely. Each ad system had their advantages and disadvantages:

• Project Wonderful: Easy to implement; very low payout unless you have a very popular site. (See Thoughts on the Project Wonderful ad system for more info.)
• Google Adsense: Easy to implement; low payout.
• Adbrite: Easy to implement; low payout; R and near-X rated ads, one ad was trying to infect Windows PC’s, which was when I dropped the program. Adbrite won’t give me my $4.94 that has accumulated in my account .:(
• Text-Link-Ads: can be tricky to implement, requires you to give special file permissions to a settings file on the web site; ads will affect your rankings in search engines; some ads are links to bad places; very high payout.

So how am I going to make money from PlanetMike since I will no longer carry advertising? For the short term, I’ll beg for donations. Longer term, I’ll ramp up my programming and consulting efforts, which will probably include reviewing sites. So, if you need some help on a web issue, feel free to contact me.

I also will be looking into what search engine I should use so that the site can be searched. Right now I use Google’s, so I do make a few cents from those searches. But those few pennies aren’t enough to justify not looking around to see what the options are. I’m open to suggestions, just leave a comment here.

I’ve finally completed moving away from using Blosxom for my blog, and using WordPress. I started out on Saturday morning by installing WordPress 2.03, looking at the options and methods for reading the data from Blosxom, designing a template, and then writing some scripts to manage requests that come in looking for my old blog to point to my new blog. I changed the directory from /blog/ to /journal/. I’ll be watching my error logs for the next few weeks to make sure that everything is working well. Let me know if you see anything that is not quite right.

I hope you liked my little prank. If you missed it, you can see it here.