A Stitch in Haste

As you probably figured out from bigger blogs than mine, the entire Powerblogs domain, and all its hosted blogs, were down most of the weekend. This was at least the fourth outage in the past two weeks. I am considering my options as to how to respond. (And, yes, I have backup files, just in case.)

Sunday CuteTuber™ will take a week off; try not to cry in your oatmeal. Otherwise it's business as usual.

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 800x600 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.

First off, thanks so much to everyone who contacted me with advice, suggestions and offers of assistance. It really meant a lot to me.

Given how easily Doc Palmer migrated his PowerBlogs posts to WordPress despite the PB export being in Movable Type format, I think I will go with WP, as per many recommendations by you to that effect. I'll worry about the template later. I intend to experiment at the free WP site just to traverse the learning curve, but that will NOT be the permanent home of the blog. Please don't link to it.

On that subject, two new blegs:

1. For those who blog on hosted web servers (rather than free sites such as Blogger or wordpress.com), please praise or pan your hosting service as appropriate. Someone already mentioned GoDaddy. Reliability, pricing, customer support, free WP installation and new domain registration are all relevant criteria. (Again, I have about 4,200 posts, 1,000 daily hits, some need for picture storage capacity but not for extensive email accounts. I'm pretty sure I'm a $10/month sort of customer based on what I've seen.)

2. For everyone: Please take a moment and name a blog that has a template that you really like. The basis can be anything from background colors and fonts to commenting features, blogroll layout, category trees, ease of navigation, anything.

3. For those who know WP well, two questions:

--On Doc Palmer's migrated site, it seems that WP assigned new URLs to the imported blogposts based on the blog title. I think it would be very helpful to keep PowerBlogs' numerical system (e.g., "kipesquire.powerblogs.com/posts/1212628504.shtml") and just change the domain name in the URL (e.g., "www.kipesquire.com/1212628504.shtml"), at least for the imported posts. This way I can, theoretically, go back and simply replace the internal links ("see my previous post") by changing the domain name in the text files. I can't possibly do that with title-based URLs, and all the imported posts would have to point back to PowerBlogs forever. I don't care about the URLs on new posts after the migration.

--Does anyone have any idea about building post-chains in WP (such as this one)? Is there even such a feature?

4. For those who know how to "301 redirect" -- I don't have access to the .htaccess file, but assume I did. Would it take one single entry to redirect every PB post to the corresponding post (especially if I can keep the numerical URLs as mentioned above), or must I settle for only redirecting the homepage? I don't need to know how to do it, just what can be done at all.

Thanks, again, to everyone!

Anyone have any experience, either directly or anecdotally, with DreamHost, the large web hosting service?

They caught my eye with this:

Web hosting provider DreamHost has recently given its customers the rather unusual advice of choosing Google's Gmail over its own email service, telling them that "it's something Google ... can do better."
...
"Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn't add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features[.]

That's certainly true for me and my blog.

In any case, what a refreshing Atlas Shrugged sort of incident this is. Part of being a "good" (i.e., successful) capitalist is being a "good" (i.e., honest and truthful) capitalist: If you can't provide a service well, then don't provide it — and certainly don't lie about it. That way ruin lies — at least in the long run.

How much of the contempt for capitalism is, I wonder, not based on any evidence of the free market's "fraud, deceit and ruthlessness" but simple projection by its opponents, who are merely afraid that businesspeople are — well, are just like them?

The preliminaries are underway (hosting service, WordPress installation, etc.).

Those who link directly to http://kipesquire.powerblogs.com will not be affected at this time.

Those who link via http://www.kipesquire.com or who read via RSS feeds might experience some brief downtime.

That is all...