Regular visitors to this site may have noticed that over the last 24 hours, the site has developed a totally different look and feel.

I will start posting content that isn’t about the redevelopment of this site again soon but the last couple of weeks have been pretty tough on the self-hosted IT front. First I started to have problems with e-mail delivery to certain hosts, then I accidentally dropped my domain off the Internet and at the same time, I’ve been busy moving this website to a new content management system and hosting provider.

For some time now, I’ve been working on rewriting the site using (semantically correct) XHTML and CSS but my lack of design skills (combined with a lack of spare time) were holding the project back. Ironically, it was my decision to dump Blogger as a content management system (a not insubstantial project in its own right) that has pulled everything together.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about WordPress, which is available as a hosted service or as software to run on a server under your own control, and I’ve chosen the latter option. In fact, over the last couple of weeks, the whole site has been migrated to a WordPress installation on ascomi‘s webspace.

It’s quite strange – most of the technology on which I’ve built my career is from Microsoft – yet I’m writing this post on a Mac and publishing it on a site which uses the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) software stack (actually, the server is running FreeBSD, so it’s really FAMP but that’s just being pedantic).

I had originally planned to run the old and new sites in parallel until all the issues were ironed out, but in practice it’s not been that straightforward as I tried to maintain the URL structure. Late last night I cut everything across to the new site but like so much on the ‘net today, Mark’s (we)Blog 2.0 is in beta!

So, why’s it been so complex? Well, so far, this is what I’ve done:

1. Order new hosting space and upload the content from old website.
2. Transfer/register all domain names and direct them to the new hosting provider’s name servers.
3. Edit .htaccess to rewrite requests from secondary domain names (or without the www. prefix) to http://www.markwilson.co.uk/.
4. Install and configure WordPress – pretty straightforward with a Fantastico scripted installation.
5. Customise WordPress – pick a template (Andreas Viklund’s WP-Andreas01), install and activate plug-ins (WP Suicide, New Blogger Import).
6. Commit WordPress Suicide, in the process wiping out default posts etc. but leaving behind users, user metadata and options.
7. Migrate Blogger content to WordPress, maintaining the existing URL structure – this was the bit that scared me most and actually it was really simple (hosted WordPress users can also directly import from Blogger). First of all I needed to switch Blogger over to host my blog at Google (BlogSpot) – as all the previously-published content was still available on my server then users would not have seen any change. Next, I used the New Blogger Import plugin to suck over 700 posts and 600 comments out of BlogSpot and into WordPress. I had an issue with the formatting of the URLs but Ady Romantika very kindly updated his script for me and the updated version ran very smoothly (a couple of posts were missed but I found them from an XML sitemap generator broken links report and migrated them manually). It’s worth noting that Ady’s script also leaves the Blogger post ID as a comment in each migrated post. Once migrated, I switched Blogger back to FTP publishing and ran the old and new sites in parallel for a short time but found that to be too much work and have since removed the Blogger site from the server (an archived version of the old site will remain in place for a few weeks at least).
8. Install and activate the Category Tagging plugin. Start to assign categories to posts and create a new post, which removed the PHP error messages that originally appeared (Warning: array_keys(): The first argument should be an array in /usr/home/username/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/category-tagging.php on line 95 and Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /usr/home/username/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/category-tagging.php on line 96).
9. Make more template formatting changes; deactivate WP Suicide and New Blogger Import; install and activate Fancy Archives and AdSense Deluxe; register for a WordPress API key and activate Akismet.
10. Create new pages to replace the non-blog content from the old site (and redirect requests using .htaccess).
11. Remove the old content and generate a new XML sitemap.

Looking back, it’s odd that one of the things holding back the redevelopment of the original site was the lack of a good design – as it happens the WordPress template that I chose is also available as a standard website template and there are loads of good-looking templates at freecsstemplates.org and at Open Source Web Design.

At the moment I’m still adding categories and tweaking the formatting (there are some CSS glitches to iron out – hence the beta tag) but I’m hoping that within a few weeks the site will be pretty much there. I also plan to go back through the template code and implement some of the CSS tips that I’ve been picking up from the old .net magazines that Alex gave me as well as two excellent books:

• Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.
• CSS The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.

If all goes to plan, subscribers shouldn’t have to change any settings, the URLs for the content should be preserved, the quality of the content should improve and my search engine placement should be maintained.