Showing posts with label migrate from wordpress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label migrate from wordpress. Show all posts
08:03
A Brief History of 9 Popular Blogging Platforms
Even though Microsoft’s spell check insists that “blog” and “blogger” are not real words, they’ve been been in the dictionary since 2003. Blogs and their platforms have a lengthy history.
The beginnings of blogging was a time not unlike today: Plaid was in style, a beloved rock star had passed, and the Internet was just gaining momentum on college campuses. In 1994, then Swarthmore College student Justin Hall started an online diary called Justin’s Links from the Underground. The site, which first started as a guide to the web, soon became an account of Hall’s life, and earned him the surely coveted title of pioneer blogger. Three years later, Jorn Barger would coin the term “weblog,” and it’s short form, “blog,” was later coined by Peter Merholz.
Today, the web is comprised of millions of blogs covering every topic imaginable. Here is short history of some of the medium’s most popular platforms.
1. Open Diary
Founded in 1998 by Bruce Ableson, Open Diary was the first website that brought online journal keepers together as a community, as users had the ability to read each other’s journals and leave comments on them. To date, the site has hosted more than five million diaries since launch, with more than half a million diaries currently being used.
2. Live Journal
Live Journal was launched in April 1999 by Danga Interactive’s Brad Fitzpatrick. It was one of the first free blogging platforms and online communities. For the first few years, the service was by invitation only but eventually became accessible to everyone.
What started as a fun project — a way for Fitzpatrick to keep up with his old high school friends in pre-Facebook days — soon became too big for one person, and Live Journal began hiring their first team.
In 2005, Six Apart bought Danga Interactive, with Fitzpatrick continuing to work on the site. In 2007, a Russian company called SUP purchased Live Journal and established LiveJournal Inc. to run it.
3. Xanga
Similar to MySpace, Xanga started off in 1999 as a social networking site frequented by teens. One year later, Xanga added blogging capabilities. The platform offers users the option of giving “eProps” to show love for a particular post. The site has an estimated 40 million users (though I’ve yet to meet anyone who uses it), and is the 1,438th most visited site in the world.
4. Blogger
Blogger was created by San Francisco company Pyra Labs in 1999. Created on a “whim” according to the site, Blogger took off, gaining in popularity. The site was bought by Google in 2003, and the platform subsequently saw the integration of Picasa and Hello.
5. Dead Journal
Based on the same open source code as Live Journal but with a darker theme, Dead Journal was created by Frank Precissi in 2001, and became a place for Goths and emo kids to write their dark, angsty thoughts. The site actually touts itself as a place “where you find the journals that nobody else wants to see, or even host,” and that they “love pissed off people, if you’re a pissed off person who hates incompetence, please sign up now!” With only 500,000 accounts, it’s surprising that every netizen isn’t a member.
6. TypePad
Launched in 2003, TypePad comes from Live Journal’s buyer, Six Apart. TypePad is based on Movable Type’s platform with the two sharing the same templates, technology and APIs. TypePad was Six Apart’s platform for the non-technical blogger. Unlike most blogging sites, TypePad isn’t free, but users do get their own .com domain names.
7. WordPress
“WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL,” according to the site. It launched in 2003 as a joint creation between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as the successor to Michel Valdrighi’s b2/cafelog blogging site. Today, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform with 54,283 of the top million sites on the Internet using it, including Mashable.
8. MySpace
MySpace launched in 2003 ready to take on Friendster as the social network of the day. Created by Brad Greenspan, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the site was similar to how it looks today; hosting full profiles and very basic blogging options. Today, according to MySpace, there are 225,747,687 blogs on the site.
9. Tumblr
Created by wunderkind David Karp in 2007, Tumblr is a recent addition to the blogosphere. Users are able to easily upload photos, text, images, video and conversation to the site for short, quick posts or lengthier ones. The site emphasizes its ease of use and encourages sharing by allowing users to “re-blog” posts they loved. With more than 6 million blogs, The New York Times (strangely) called it, “Facebook and Twitter’s new rival.”
05:25
How to Migrate your Blog from WordPress.com to a Personal Domain
This guide is for bloggers who plan to move their site from wordpress.com to a personal web domain using the self-hosted version of WordPress blogging software (wordpress.org).
After the migration in complete, all your older blog links will continue to work and visitors will be redirected to the new site.
Why move to WordPress.org?
Like most other people, you started your first blog on WordPress.com because the service was free, you weren’t required to have any technical skills and there were plenty of widgets, themes and plug-ins to help you quickly customize the blog.
Then, as your blog was getting popular, you found certain limitations. For instance, you could not monetize your blog traffic because WordPress prohibits the use of Google AdSense and other forms of advertising on free sites. There are thousands of beautiful themes for WordPress out there but your choices were limited. WordPress.com doesn’t allow JavaScript so you couldn’t use advanced tracking software like Google Analytics.
Other than Google ads and themes, a big reason why you may want to move from wordpress.com to a personal web domain is branding.
Step 1: Get a domain name and rent some server space
To move your blog from WordPress.com to your own domain, you first need to have a web domain and some server space where you’ll host that blog.
Though you may buy web domains at reasonable prices from site like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, I recommend Google Apps that costs $10 per year per domain. In return, you get all the Google goodies (like Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) but the best part of the deal is that your registration details will stay private – people won’t be able to see your address or phone number from the whois record of your domain.
Web hosting services that you may want to consider for hosting your WordPress blog include Dreamhost, Rackspace, Media Temple, Blue Host and KnowHost. Digital Inspiration is hosted on Dreamhost.com PS and am fairly satisfied.
Step 2: Transfer posts from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Now that you have the basic infrastructure in place, let’s setup a WordPress blog. All web hosting companies offer 1-click WordPress installation so this shouldn’t be a tricky thing but make sure that you install WordPress software in a sub-directory – see instructions.
Next go to your old WordPress.com admin dashboard, click Tools –> Export, and save the XML file to your local computer (fig. A). Now, in your new site’s WordPress admin panel, click Tools –> Import and then choose WordPress. Select the file you previously downloaded. On the next page, choose the authors, and check the box that says “Import Attachments.”
Everything from your old WordPress.com blog, including images and other attachments, will now be automatically imported into your new WordPress.org blog.
Step 3: Redirect visitors and search engines to your new blog
Your new WordPress.org blog is a copy of your old WordPress.com site but search engines and human visitors will still land on your old site as they know nothing about the new one. Therefore we need a mechanism to redirect traffic coming to the old WordPress.com addresses to your new blog.
This is not that difficult either. First, login to your domain registrar (the company with whom you registered the domain). Then change your domain’s DNS settings so that your domain points to WordPress.com servers.
Important: Make sure that you write down the existing nameserver addresses, as you will need them later on.
Once you have noted that information, change the DNS name servers to ns1.wordpress.com, ns2.wordpress.com and ns3.wordpress.com. The domain registrar, in some cases, may request you confirm the change in name-servers.
From your WordPress.com blog’s dashboard, select Upgrades -> Domains. Enter the URL of your new domain, and click “Add Domain to blog.” Then click “Map Domain” when asked to confirm that you wish to add this address to the blog. You cannot have www in the URLs and also don’t put the trailing slash.
Domain mapping is a premium service and will cost you $10 per year. You can pay with either PayPal or a credit card of your choice.
Once this is completed, you need to set your personal domain (abc.com) as the primary address for the WordPress.com blog. In your WordPress.com admin panel, go back to Upgrades and select Domains. Select the checkbox for the domain you just added and click Update Primary Domain.
Step 4: Reverse the DNS Nameserver changes
Change your web domain’s DNS servers back to the original nameserver settings. Save the changes, wait for a while and now both your personal web domain (abc.com) and the old WordPress blog (abc.wordpress.com) will take you to the new site.
That’s it. Incoming links, search engine traffic, RSS readers, and everything else will get redirected to your new site. You will however have to renew the domain mapping upgrade from WordPress.com every year if you wish to keep your WordPress.com address redirecting* to your new site.
[*] WordPress.com uses a 302 redirect with domain mapping which means a “temporary redirect” and therefore search engine bots will continue to index your old site in addition to the new one.
[**] If your blog is hosted on Blogger, read this tutorial to migrate from blogspot to your own down using WordPress.
After the migration in complete, all your older blog links will continue to work and visitors will be redirected to the new site.
Why move to WordPress.org?
Like most other people, you started your first blog on WordPress.com because the service was free, you weren’t required to have any technical skills and there were plenty of widgets, themes and plug-ins to help you quickly customize the blog.
Then, as your blog was getting popular, you found certain limitations. For instance, you could not monetize your blog traffic because WordPress prohibits the use of Google AdSense and other forms of advertising on free sites. There are thousands of beautiful themes for WordPress out there but your choices were limited. WordPress.com doesn’t allow JavaScript so you couldn’t use advanced tracking software like Google Analytics.
Other than Google ads and themes, a big reason why you may want to move from wordpress.com to a personal web domain is branding.
Step 1: Get a domain name and rent some server space
To move your blog from WordPress.com to your own domain, you first need to have a web domain and some server space where you’ll host that blog.Though you may buy web domains at reasonable prices from site like GoDaddy or Network Solutions, I recommend Google Apps that costs $10 per year per domain. In return, you get all the Google goodies (like Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) but the best part of the deal is that your registration details will stay private – people won’t be able to see your address or phone number from the whois record of your domain.
Web hosting services that you may want to consider for hosting your WordPress blog include Dreamhost, Rackspace, Media Temple, Blue Host and KnowHost. Digital Inspiration is hosted on Dreamhost.com PS and am fairly satisfied.
Step 2: Transfer posts from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Now that you have the basic infrastructure in place, let’s setup a WordPress blog. All web hosting companies offer 1-click WordPress installation so this shouldn’t be a tricky thing but make sure that you install WordPress software in a sub-directory – see instructions.
Next go to your old WordPress.com admin dashboard, click Tools –> Export, and save the XML file to your local computer (fig. A). Now, in your new site’s WordPress admin panel, click Tools –> Import and then choose WordPress. Select the file you previously downloaded. On the next page, choose the authors, and check the box that says “Import Attachments.”
Everything from your old WordPress.com blog, including images and other attachments, will now be automatically imported into your new WordPress.org blog.
Step 3: Redirect visitors and search engines to your new blog
Your new WordPress.org blog is a copy of your old WordPress.com site but search engines and human visitors will still land on your old site as they know nothing about the new one. Therefore we need a mechanism to redirect traffic coming to the old WordPress.com addresses to your new blog.
This is not that difficult either. First, login to your domain registrar (the company with whom you registered the domain). Then change your domain’s DNS settings so that your domain points to WordPress.com servers.
Important: Make sure that you write down the existing nameserver addresses, as you will need them later on.
Once you have noted that information, change the DNS name servers to ns1.wordpress.com, ns2.wordpress.com and ns3.wordpress.com. The domain registrar, in some cases, may request you confirm the change in name-servers.
From your WordPress.com blog’s dashboard, select Upgrades -> Domains. Enter the URL of your new domain, and click “Add Domain to blog.” Then click “Map Domain” when asked to confirm that you wish to add this address to the blog. You cannot have www in the URLs and also don’t put the trailing slash.
Domain mapping is a premium service and will cost you $10 per year. You can pay with either PayPal or a credit card of your choice.
Once this is completed, you need to set your personal domain (abc.com) as the primary address for the WordPress.com blog. In your WordPress.com admin panel, go back to Upgrades and select Domains. Select the checkbox for the domain you just added and click Update Primary Domain.
Step 4: Reverse the DNS Nameserver changes
Change your web domain’s DNS servers back to the original nameserver settings. Save the changes, wait for a while and now both your personal web domain (abc.com) and the old WordPress blog (abc.wordpress.com) will take you to the new site.
That’s it. Incoming links, search engine traffic, RSS readers, and everything else will get redirected to your new site. You will however have to renew the domain mapping upgrade from WordPress.com every year if you wish to keep your WordPress.com address redirecting* to your new site.
[*] WordPress.com uses a 302 redirect with domain mapping which means a “temporary redirect” and therefore search engine bots will continue to index your old site in addition to the new one.
[**] If your blog is hosted on Blogger, read this tutorial to migrate from blogspot to your own down using WordPress.