I am not shifting house. Rather, I am talking about moving data to a new location. As I type these words, I am aware that they will not end up on the server of my domain. I have now officially moved my eJournal and images over to blogspot.com. I had to. Blogger.com will cease letting people FPT to their own site. The hard part of moving was taking six and a half years of daily entries with me.
Here's a reminder what the former site looked like on its last day.
First, exporting that old textual information and importing it at the new location was relatively painless. The new site offered less flexibility in page format design. There were very few new templates that I found appealing. I have always liked unadorned and unembellished web pages. I discovered a basic template, kept the white background, and recreated some of the information from the previous incarnation. Doing this editing took several hours.
Next, I spent yesterday creating replacement redirection pages for the old location. That means every single file needed to be modified by hand. Bear in mind that there were at least 550 of them. This seemed to take a lot of time but, in a way, it was an enjoyable, mind-numbing task. I've got links scattered all over the place and now they should all be forwarded to the new site. I get between one and two hundred hits from search engines each day and; as a result, I wanted to keep this traffic until the newer location is indexed. This took a few more hours.
Unfortunately, I will never be completely done. My main problem is that I included photos for around 80% of my entries. I 'hardwired' them to my old location to keep them displayable from the subdirectories of the site. For example,
remains at the old location and has since September of 2003. As it stands, about 100 megabytes of pictures are still in the former directory. These cannot be moved to the new location. I'm certainly not going to go back and edit every single one of the 2583 entries! So, I get the odd sensation that although my site works, it is no longer sitting as one intact entity.