Thursday, May 25, 2006

Finally bit the bullet...

So - I've finally summoned up the courage to migrate Gastronomy Domine to my own domain - the new address is www.gastronomydomine.com. (If you are one of those who is kind enough to link to me in your blogrolls, I'd be really grateful if you could update the link.)

I've a few questions for people who've been through this process before. First of all - am I still doomed to use Blogger for all time now, or is there any way to keep my existing posts and start using a different tool? (I'm a bit sick of the outages and problems uploading photos with Blogger, which seem to be becoming more frequent). How long did you leave it before you removed all the content from your blogspot.com address, or did you leave the content there permanently? And is it worth uploading all my old pictures (there are more than a thousand) to the new server, or should I just leave them hosted at photos.blogger.com?


This post was written by Liz (Squeezeweasel) from Gastronomy Domine.

10 comments:

Kalyn Denny said...

I will update your link on my blogroll. However, I have a lot of links to your past posts for WHB which will be lost if you don't keep the blogspot address referring to your new site. That would also be true for any other food blog event you have ever participated in. Just a thought. I don't think there is any possible way to update all those links. That's the main reason I've decided I'm doomed to stay with Blogger. I can't imagine losing all those past links.

Liz said...

Argh - very good point. I'd not considered that. I suppose it makes my mind up for me - the old site stays where it is.

I've a nice post for you this weekend, anyway; the herb garden is loving the wet weather!

Andrea said...

Another point of view on keeping both the old and new blogs up. I used to host my blog on wordpress.com, and when I moved to my own hosting I found that I was getting more visitors at the old site than at the new one. So I posted a very clear message that the blog had moved and provided a link as well as a list of some of the newest recipes posted to try and entice people to come over. It was very hard! The search engines still pointed to the old site, and Food Porn Watch and Kiplog took a while to catch up to the new location, all of which was driving traffic to the old location. I finally removed all the content from the old site and posted one final message saying that all content had been moved to the new site. Traffic is finally getting back to pre-move levels, but it has taken a couple months.

MizD said...

I'm lucky I haven't ever had to change my primary address, but I am in the middle of changing all of my permalinks. I switched from MT to Wordpress, and I would rather have visitors go to the new version of each page than the old, so what I've had to do is go into the control panel for my domain and redirect each link manually. If you have cpanel access with your domain hosting, that is one route -- though it is rather time consuming!

Anonymous said...

Hmm
I left my old blogspot address and I put a big sign over the top of the heading which says eatstuff has moved. It seems to work!

Cybele said...

I moved my old blogspot blog - fastfiction.blogspot.com to my new domain typetive.com/fastfiction

My traffic is fine (never a whole lot to begin with) but the old site still gets a lot of visits, even though all the content was transfered over. I figured after a year I'll pull the plug on the blogspot blog.

When I moved from blogger to Expression Engine, I kept all my posts for both my blogs, but all the URLs changed, so I have an autoforward on any wrong address that takes people to the home page (where they'll hopefully use the search feature).

I would definitely move your photos over. Just take it a little at a time - do a month a week or some sort fo schedule.

Most of the major blogging software will import other blogs. You are by no means locked in to blogger for the rest of your days.

Liz said...

Yup - have to agree, the search engines thing is wildly annoying. I was getting a lot of hits from Google, but it's obviously going to take a while for the search engines to pick the new site up, so the majority of traffic is still going to the old one.

Kevin said...

It's been a couple of years (or more) since I moved from blogger hosting to my own domain, but as I recall the tool blogger provided for transferring the blog worked perfectly and transferred all my files from blogger to my new server. Here's a link:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=129&query=move%20blog&topic=0&type=f

And as for uploading images using blogger, I've always had problems with that, so once I moved to my own domain I quit using blogger and just copied image files from my computer to the server.

Liz said...

Yup - I found the tool at Blogger very helpful too - unfortunately, although all the text, the template and comments are now hosted on my server, the pictures aren't. Only those photos posted since the move are being hosted on my server. Looks like I'm just going to have to work my way through them and upload all the old ones again, one by one. Gah.

Anonymous said...

When we moved from typepad to moveable type, Tejal and I lost all our photos and titles. She is way more responsible than me and has already gone back and fixed her entries. I can't bring myself to do it. So many pictures to slog through. . . it makes my skin crawl. Not to mention trying to think up new witty titles. I totally feel your pain on this one.