Meta-Blogging: RFP — Blog Migration
I have decided to explore the feasibility of migrating this blog off PowerBlogs. The weekend outage was merely the latest in a string of issues and concerns I have had recently about whether PowerBlogs is even a going concern anymore.
It appears that I will have little choice but to adopt Movable Type, as that is the only export format that PowerBlogs provides. I therefore need help on three fronts:
1. How best to learn MT (tutorial sites, books, etc.).
2. How best to change “www.kipesquire.com” from a simple parked redirect to a bona fide web domain (or, alternatively, the best web hosting service to start from scratch with a new main domain name).
3. Most importantly, someone with experience in such things to undertake this migration for me as a paid project.
Here are some of the parameters:
–I have owned www.kipesquire.com for some time, but it merely redirects to kipesquire.powerblogs.com. I would need a hosting service.
–I have about 4,200 posts and about 1,000 daily hits. I am currently using 150.82 megabytes, 59.23 megabytes of which are used by blog posts and 33.64 megabytes of which are used by uploaded files (almost all JPG pics).
–PowerBlogs provides the following export files: a Movable Type “MTDATA” file, each post in TXT format, “.TEMPLATE” & “.CSS” & “.HTML” files for the various components of the layout. Most or all the components are also directly HTML-editable and copyable from the PowerBlogs user interface. I also have simple monthly archives in “Web Page, Complete” format.
–I would want the PowerBlogs site to be, as I understand it, “301 redirected” for search engine purposes. Indeed, I’d like to amend the PowerBlogs code to redirect every post to the corresponding post on the new site.
–Maintaining Category functionality is all-important. Maintaining the “Related Posts” chain feature (which I believe is unique to PowerBlogs) is less important. I would also like my category tree to be preserved (the categories are nested — e.g., “First Amendment” is a subset of “Constitutional Issues”). I would also like Category links to appear to each blogpost — a feature PowerBlogs does not provide.
–Comment accounts are not as important a functionality as anti-spam commenting (captcha, etc.). Comment preview functionality would be nice.
–Trackback functionality (both sending and receiving) is highly desirable, including the ability to manually delete trackback spam.
–Ditto for auto-pinging services such as Technorati, Google, Bloglines, etc.
–I would like, if such things are possible, for the blog’s layout (i.e., the width of the main column) to adapt to each user’s monitor resolution (the current layout is fixed to be 800×600 compatible).
–I would strongly prefer to generate my own RSS feeds (both full-content and title-only) rather than rely on Feedburner. I am indifferent as to format (2.0 v. Atom).
I’d prefer someone in NYC, who could walk me through his work and such — but it’s not necessary.
Finally, to quote Dr. McCoy: “Price you name — money I got!”
Please contact me by email if you’re interested.
Filed under: Metablogging
I was going to offer my help when I first started reading this, but your requirements quickly outgrew my skills.
I will say that you are probably not limited to Movable Type. With all that you are asking for, you're probably going to end up hiring someone skillful enough to translate your stuff to whatever blogging engine you like.
That said, I think your best choices of blog engine are going to be Movable Type or WordPress. They're both big and fairly-well supported. I'm using MT, but if I were starting from scratch, I might use WordPress instead.
Whatever you do, make sure you own and control everything yourself. Don't buy your domain names through your hosting company, or you'll have a hard time when you want to leave. I control my own domains and I can move my blog to a new host in a few hours.
Also, make sure your hosting company uses a standard administrative interface like cpanel. If they've got something home grown, it just makes it harder for you to get technical help from a third party.
Good luck.
I'm not that familiar with MT, or I'd try and help. Though, as windypundit said, you may not be limited to MT. I know WordPress can import information from MT so if the powerblogs export for MT is the same as the MT export, you have at least WordPress also available (though I have heard some horror stories about trying to move from MT to anywhere else). Most of the major blogging platforms out there support all the features you're requesting.
But I will tell you that I've been fairly happy with GoDaddy as my host (though I'm not crazy about their politics). They don't use cPanel for their back-end admin, but I've never found theirs to be anything but intuitive the little that I've used it (typically once you get a CMS set up you're doing most of your admin through it anyhow). 301 Redirection (I'm pretty sure) is only available if you are (a) on an Apache server (you probably are), and (b) you have access to edit your .htaccess file. A dynamic width website is not only possible, but should be simple to any web designer.
I am not familiar with MT either, but don't think you are limited to it. Most blog engines have a way of reading others output files. I haven't looked, but there may be a way for wordpress to do it. Something tells me blogger can do it for sure.
If you don't want to bother with getting your own host, you can try blogger and wordpress blogs online, they will also let you use your own domain name on them.
I just checked, the latest version of wordpress will import MT export files. You'd have to simply set up a host server then install wordpress (if you get a Cpanel hosted account then you can do this from your control panel easily). Once it's installed, you go into your admin feature and import the exported file.
Likewise, you should be able to simply do a wordpress or blogger online account.
One thing that is going to be an issue I can tell you is the images. All your images no doubt link to your powerblogs account. You will have to go through each post and change the url of each image to the new account. It's a bitch, I've had to do it before when I swiched domains.
Images shouldn't be a problem unless powerblogs prohibits hotlinking or you plan on deleting your blog here. The old images won't be on the new server, but they'll still show up on your blog.
Actually, it you're doing a mod_rewrite in your .htaccess file to begin with (to setup you 301 redirects), it should just as easily redirect your images. I would think, at least (I'm not 100% sure about that).