Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Posts

New beginnings

After 2 years of procrastination I have finally transferred this site over to WordPress . My first WordPress site was for the Our Social World conference in September 2005, which I think is just about when WP was released to the public.

Geoff trying to smileSince then I have set up quite a few WP blogs for friends. Ellee’s being the first and more recently Sally’s

I have been very impressed at the rate of development in the WP community and the huge range of plugins available. WP also seems very stable and forgiving of novices like myself.

If you are interested in WP then a good blog to read is Lorelle on WordPress where she offers tips and advice.

Please let me know of any broken links (all links take you to the home page – no 404’s here!) or unexpected behaviour.

Looking forward to see how the change affects my google ranking for Geoff and Geoff Jones.

Changeover process

I have now imported all the posts created in the past few years created using blogger . These were ftp’d to my site hosted by domain direct. I couldn’t do it the import direct from my old site, so I republished the 697 posts onto a blogger hosted site and then imported them to this WordPress site using the integrated import utility.

I then used the Advanced Permalinks plugin from John Godley which neatly allowed me to adjust permalink structure on the 697 posts imported to be identical to their previous blogger structure.

Using John’s other plugin, Redirection, then allowed me to use a permanent redirection from my old url’s to the new wordpress ones . I can now use html pages or wordpress pages on this site and the users including Google can’t spot the difference from the old site.

Redirection also allows me to automatically correct any 404 (page not found) errors that my users might get, by sending them straight to the home page – whilst also letting me know of the precise error – so I can correct it with a 302 (permanent page redirection).

Its all looking good, so far, with no help from the folks at rentacoder either :-).

Republishing

Have now disconnected the ftp publishing of this blog to geoffjones.com/blogger.html and made it publish to geoffsnewnewold.blogspot.com, with the intention that I can import all the last 4 years of entries to my new wordpress blog.

The end is nigh..

At last I might be getting this site sorted out so that I can update it easier and improve the navigation. I have posted a request on rentacoder to upgrade the site to wordpress so the site will be in php rather than html.

This will enable me to have a much bigger website (well I have 60 years of data to add 🙂 ), better navigation, higher google ranking and with all the cool features that I have added to Sally’s site for a much lower cost.

My biggest concern is that we can maintain all the existing links to the blog archives and my Les Gets page.

Hopefully by the end of October it will be sorted………