Welcome to the new blog home!
Surprise! I spent a little bit of time and moved the main blog to the WordPress platform. Initial reasons for doing that were outlined here, and I have gotten more and more convinced of the overall superiority of WordPress as I kept playing with it. I might write more on the subject later on.
I had to write my own database conversion script to migrate all of the b2evolution stuff to WordPress, as there does not seem to be anything available on the web, aside from convoluted “disguise-it-as-another-platform” procedures. I am quite happy with the result, and if anyone ever needs such a script, I am more than willing to share. The rest of the work was in adjusting all of the theme templates to something that would be usable without much tweaking across multiple themes.
The initial look and feel is very much like the one at the old location. I still need to make some internal adjustments, but the new site is already in operation. Please feel free to let me know if you come across any glitches.
And if you put my blog under Favorites, you may want to update the link, although if you are still pointed to the old b2evolution location, it will kick you over here automatically . Either www.burlaki.com or www.burlaki.com/blog will do the trick.
Hey, Ilya, it looks good so far! I’ll keep an eye out for broken links and such…
Pretty impressive feat, by the way, writing that script. I don’t think I’m any slouch in the ways of computers and web stuff, but that sort of thing is far beyond my abilities.
Thanks, Jason! I did spend most of my life writing pretty complicated programs for others, so I might as well occasionally use the skills for my own benefit
It is a huge surprise indeed! Congratulations on successfully getting through every webmaster’s worst nightmare: switching platforms. I’ve noticed something that is not really a glitch in the sense that it may create inconvenience to your human readers (keyword being “human”); but rather something that may confuse the lights out of web spiders.
Forgive my lecturing, but this is something that a website may loose quite a few visitors over.
If you click on Calendar or Old Front Page in the upper right corner of your website, you will be naturally enough taken to.. the old main page. And while we, humans know it to be old, our dearest robotic friends: Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp and others still treat it as the main page. I don’t think they are artificially intelligent enough to comprehend and interpret your “Welcome to the new blog home!” post above. Besides, there may be quite a few external links pointing to it, telling them how important this “old” main page is.
So a ‘bot still thinks of it as one of the main pages on the website. And while indexing it, it comes across quite a few b2evolution links that you made redirects.
Now, depending on the laziness of the ‘bot, it may or may not follow the redirected links. In the best case scenario it will follow the redirects and discover the bold new world of Burlaki on WordPress. But. In the worst case scenario it may think that the site is dead, hijacked, not there anymore and a result drop you in its ratings.
To conclude this long tirade, I recommend changing all links on all your old home and calendar pages to permanent links to their new respective urls.
Whew, this must be the longest piece I’ve written since high school. Good luck with your site!
How funny! I’m right in the middle of updating my site to WordPress (I posted about it on Jason’s blog the other day, but basically Blogger has screwed me over, so now it’s time to move).
Your site will, of course, immediately become a design guide for me, so thanks for that.
As for that conversion script – can you send me an e-mail with more details (or post about it here?) I need to convert from Blogger, in which all the data is HTML based, not stored in database tables, so I’m dreading what might eventually be a re-keying (or Excel macros + cut/pasting) exercise. Any help would be much appreciated…
Looking forward to releasing my new look any day now…
Thanks, Artyomchik! I simply missed the fact that I needed to modify those links as well, which I will do in short order. Your efforts were not for nothing
Brian – I’ll send you the script later today. Even though it is geared towards db-to-db conversion, you may get some structural idea out of it.
Change the font please! Using the Arial/Verdana variety in the headings and then switching over to Times new Roman is a bit painful on the eye.
Besides for whatever reason web-design convention is never to use a Serif font on the web.
Yeah, I might. For some reason, I kinda like how it looks on my screen, but I see your point.