When I decided about a month ago that I was going to need to move this dog and pony show from Tumblr to WordPress, I started looking at how that would have to work. It would have been fairly straightforward except for two little issues:
- I had been using Disqus for comments on the Tumblr site and, while I was perfectly happy with them, I wanted to switch to native WordPress comments here because they don’t require a login and they’re stored in a database that belongs to me on a server over which I have absolute control. Getting comments out of Disqus and into WordPress was going to be a very, very long and painful process that I would undoubtedly screw up at least twice and I’m all out of whisky money.
- Tumblr’s URL scheme (/post/<the post id>/the-post-slug) going to go away and be replaced with the new, beautifully simple URLs. This would mean that I would have to create a redirect for each post instructing the server to send a user to the new URL whenever they visited a Tumblr-style URL. Granted, this blog isn’t super old and we’re only talking about 30-some-odd posts, but it still qualified as a big, stinging pain in the derriere.
After considering all of this, I was faced with a decision: I could either spend a metric frickton of time doing all of this myself or I could pay somebody else to do it. Naturally, I went with the second option and, boy howdy, am I ever glad I did.
I found a link to Blog Wranglers on Chris Brogan’s blog a couple weeks back and, after clicking through to see what their deal was, I was pretty sure I’d find my huckleberries. I shot them an email explaining what I wanted to do and, within a day or so we’d worked out the logistics, timeframe and cost and they got down to working their magic. They went from handshake to handoff in something like three days (which was awesome and way ahead of schedule) and the price was very fair for the work they did versus the amount of time I would have had to spend doing it.
I want to make sure I make this clear: I don’t doubt that I could have done everything they did. I know enough about WordPress and XML and all that jazz to have been able to slog my way through it, but it would have taken me a great deal longer and caused me a great deal more stress if I had. That’s why hiring these guys was such an incredibly easy decision - not because it was especially cheap, but my time would be better spent doing what I do “better” (ha), which is writing these goofy blog posts and making bad jokes on Twitter.
It’s not unlike changing the oil on a car; I know how to do it and could fumble my way through it if I really had to, but the opportunity cost of changing my own oil is prohibitively high compared to driving to Jiffy Lube and have new oil and a new filter for about $30 and be finished in a half an hour. If I’d done it myself, figure $20 for the oil and filter + at least an hour of my time doing the job + 30 minutes driving the used oil to some reclamation facility. Choices don’t get much more obvious than that, friends.
[Some Boring Administrative Crap Follows]
As I mentioned in the last update post, the plan was to move this blog to WordPress. I say “was” because, well, it’s already done! If you’re viewing this in your RSS reader, you may not have noticed that the web site now looks absolutely boring and utterly plain. Well, as my hot-rod fanatic brother-in-law would say, “it needs to go fast before it looks good.” A custom theme is in the works and should be done relatively soon, but I wanted to get the WordPress migration done sooner rather than later and I was more than willing to sacrifice some prettiness to make that happen.
Regarding the RSS feed, I’m afraid that Feedburner did what I had sort of expected - the last five posts I had published on Tumblr were re-published to the feed the day I made the switch. Sorry about that!
One thing that didn’t get sorted out is the categories/tags thing, so that’ll be something I fix over the next few days and you probably won’t even notice.
Thanks so much for sticking through this and I promise this will be the last “meta” post I write for awhile (aside from the forthcoming post in which I defend my move to WordPress).
Don’t forget - from now until Friday, October 15, you can take a really simple survey and be entered into a drawing to win either a Kindle 3 or an iPod Nano. Go here and take the freaking survey already.
Photo by Cindy Seigle
Hi Brett,
If I can help you with the category/tag bit, do let me know. Glad it went fairly smoothly. Jim doesn’t usually let me out of the back room here (well it’s an old Conestoga wagon really) over here at http://blogwranglers.com
Any other loose ends, feel free to let us know.
Blog moves and migration, tune up and improvement is what we do — so glad you found us and glad things went fairly smooth.
Don
datawrangler at blogwranglers -dot- com
1) The current theme is decent enough.
2) Switching from full to partial (RSS) feeds is as close as you can come to saying “I hate you; stop reading my site” without actually saying it. (Forgive the slight exaggeration, but partial feeds are truly evil.)
Ah, crap, I didn’t realize that WordPress still did that thing where they truncate posts in the feed if the post contains the “” tag (which is moronic). I just installed a plugin that should remedy this once the feed gets refreshed by FeedBurner. Sorry about that (and I totally agree about the evil thing).
Ah, much awesomeness. Thanks. :-)
Thanks :)