Pages

Monday, 24 May 2010

I've just entered a whole new world

Yesterday I switched my blog. Not an earth shattering event you might think, but I think it might be (for me) significant. After having the idea months ago it took me a while to get round to it, not least because it involved finding a host at a reasonable price and deciding on a domain name. So, this is it. Nothing too fancy yet (I don't think I ever want it to be fancy) and still the same Titan theme, but at least I now have flexibility.

This is what setting it up involved

  • Finding a host - I went for siteground. I got a recommendation from Alan, and friend referrer rate. Thanks Alan :)
  • Deciding on a domain name - which is pretty tricky when all the good ones you can think of are already taken and you want something that is going to last, is easy to remember and is relevant to what you do. In the end I went for studentdevpt.com. I'm not sure it meets all the criteria, but it's the best one I could think of.
  • Redirecting my previous wordpress.com blog using these helpful instructions (with support from Alun about the redirect here, about mapping urls here and about plugins here)
  • Exporting the content from my wordpress.com blog and importing it into my new siteground-hosted blog (thanks again Alun)
  • Changing embedded content that was set to work on wordpress.com because it now didn't display, e.g. Slideshare, Scribd etc.
All that probably only took about an hour - although it was stretched over a couple because I was in and out of the garden.

This is what I'm looking forward to

Finally

Thanks to Alan, Alun, JJ and Joss for their help in various ways.

And if anyone you have any helpful hints or suggestions (especially for themes and plugins) for a wordpress.org newbie - I'd love to hear from you.

And hopefully I've have set up Twitterfeed correctly so this post pushes out to Twitter as it used to with my other site...
Posted by at
Labels: ,

12 comments:

  1. AJ Cann24 May 2010 at 11:29

    Now you're "on your own", as it were, the most important thing is to maintain security of your site. Archive regularly and ensure you are always running the most recent version of WordPress. Most importantly, use a secure Admin username and password, not one which is easily guessed or the default provided by WordPress. Have fun :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. CJ Shore24 May 2010 at 11:42

    Can you get rid of those terrible bullets points now?

    ReplyDelete
  3. stujohnson24 May 2010 at 11:51

    I will when I get a mo... :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. stujohnson24 May 2010 at 11:53

    I'm on WP v2.9.2. Am I right in thinking v3 isn't quite out yet? Presumably I'll have to do something in siteground when it's available?

    ReplyDelete
  5. stujohnson24 May 2010 at 11:56

    Just noticed I'm not getting emailed when someone comments. Just changed something and now testing it...

    ReplyDelete
  6. stujohnson24 May 2010 at 11:58

    Do you know how I create a sub-site for testing? Do I have to register (and pay for) another domain?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Alun24 May 2010 at 12:36

    There'll be a big unmissable banner in your dashboard when version 3.0 is out. It may be possible to click a link to upgrade the site painlessly.

    Another thing you can do to improve security is move the wp-config.php file up a directory. e.g. if it's in /home/stu/public_html/ move it to /home/stu/ it'll still work, but it means your config filr isn't in a publicly accessible location.

    ReplyDelete
  8. CJ Shore24 May 2010 at 12:54

    Depending on what web hosting package you bought, you should have some (or maybe unlimited) sub-domains. These can be something like test.studentdevpt.com or trial.studentdevpt.com.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Stuart Johnson24 May 2010 at 15:17

    Excellent. Thanks for all your help. Do you know if I can create another site on the same domain with different themes & plugins? I want to create a test area to mock up a website for a friend.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Jay Jay25 May 2010 at 17:54

    Good work - now you should have a little bit more freedom to play around with wordpress and other types of CMS (it's really handy to know a little about what goes on in the background!)

    You should change the comment system to something like Disqus (unless there is a newer, shinier one on the market - Alan will know!)

    Any problems - let me know and will see if I can help! :-)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Stuart Johnson26 May 2010 at 08:51

    Disqus now installed. Though I did that before Alan said he was going off it! Still, it's defo an improvement on the default WP comments. And the way it exports old WP comments to Disqus is v clever

    ReplyDelete
  12. I have upgraded my blog | Forty219 July 2010 at 23:58

    [...] embed and share content on my original blog. With thanks to advice from @stujohnson, his blog post I’ve just entered a whole new world and several tutorials I think I’m finally [...]

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)