Dec 19 2007
My Journey Moving from Wordpress.com to my Own Domain - The Best Plugins for Getting Started
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If you’re reading this then you are on my new blog domain! My journey as a blogger, while fairly brief, has been pretty eventful. I started in August by using the built in software in Bloglines. I pretty much held my nose and jumped in using the first tool at hand. After a week, though, I realized I needed something more robust and so moved to a blog on WordPress.com.
This time I did a little research before hand. I wasn’t ready to spend the money on a private domain or the time to learn how to install and administer software. Wordpress was clearly the best reviewed service, so I started blogging at sllarsen.wordpress.com (the original Flying Cloud).
Note: If you’ve read my about page you know that I am a VP at Northern Light (a purveyor of custom research portals and search software). Northern Light is named after a clipper ship. The sister ship to the Northern Light was the Flying Cloud. Ta da!
I couldn’t figure out how to get my original posts from Bloglines into Wordpress.com, but they were “experimental” (shall we say). I was able to create a very nice site if I do say so myself - and I didn’t, thanks, Kyle!
I was very happy on Wordpress.com for several months until I realized how difficult/impossible it is do any advanced usage tracking or to leverage social media plugins. Also, I am working on developing an blogging program at Northern Light and clearly we would need to use installed blogging software on our own servers using our own domains.
Since my current hosting service for my personal website/email was about to expire, I looked around for a new host that would be 1) cheaper and 2) able to easily work with Wordpress software. I went with AN Hosting after reading several reviews and because of their program to support WordPress. I also bought a new domain - sherilarsen.com. Once I figured out my various account logins, I was able to use Fantastico from my cpanel administration site to install Wordpress in about 30 seconds.
In less than 36 hours I had my new site up and all my posts imported from my Wordpress.com site. All I had to do was export my posts from one and import them into the other. Of course now I have two parallel sites. I had built a small but hard won following on sllarsen.wordpress.com that I want to migrate to sherilarsen.com, but that is not so easy. I can find no way to seamlessly redirect a person from a post on one domain to the same post on the other.
My solution was to create a new post on sllarsen.wordpress.com announcing my my domain, remove all the widgets from the site, replace to delete all least popular posts from sllarsen.wordpress.com completely. For the popular ones I put links in referring readers to the versions on my new domain. I spent a lot of time looking for ways to automatically redirect, but couldn’t find anything that works with Wordpress.com.
My new tasks is to find all the places online that refer to my sllarsen.wordpress.com and replace it with sherilarsen.com. I keep finding them!
I did a lot of research on helpful plugins for a new Wordpress blog and here’s the list I’ve installed so far:
- What Would Seth Godin Do - shows a welcome box to new visitors
- All in One SEO Pack - adds titles, keywords and descriptions to the metadata of your posts
- del.icio.us for Wordpress - creates a headlines list of my Delicious bookmarks. I have it limited to just bookmarks I tag with “postthis.” Can also create a daily post from Delicious links - but I have not turned it on yet.
- Postalicious - creates a post from your Delicious links. I have it set to create a draft to see if it will help make my semi-weekly link post easier to create.
- Delicatessen - for seeing who’s linking to my posts in Delicious
- ShareThis - social bookmarking from each post - although I am thinking of trying Sociable to see the difference.
- MyBlogLog Widget - shows my recent readers
- Twitter Tools - shows my Tweets in the sidebar, creates a blog post from my daily tweets, creates a tweet when I post a blog entry
- Evermore - truncates my posts on the home page to no more than 3 paragraphs (this can be changed in the settings)
- Google XML Sitemaps - for automatically creating and updating a sitemap for Google to use when crawling
- Google Analytics - for usage tracking from Google
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - for managing my RSS feeds
- One-click Installer - installs any plugin or theme without having to upload them manually via ftp. Can also delete theme and plugin folders.
- Adsense-Deluxe - I signed up for Adsense just to see how it works these days, but I can’t get this plugin to work.
- WordPress Database Backup - on-demand backup of your WordPress database.
- Wordpress Reports - generates reports from Google Analytics and Feedburner data on a tab inside the WordPress administration
I also installed the Lijit search “wijit”. Let’s readers search not just your blog posts, but also the content of your other social media profiles (like your Delicious and Digg links and your Linkedin and Facebook profiles. Cool!
If you have some questions or need help with moving from WordPress.com to a hosted domain - I’d be happy to help as much as I can. Just leave me a comment or email me at sheri at sherilarsen dot com.
