For a while now, I have been trying to figure out if I wanted to maintain more than one website/blog and recently came to the conclusion it would be better to concentrate on one instead of spreading myself (and my musings) out across numerous sites or blogs. With this decision came the tough part of the process. Figuring out how to accomplish the task of merging all my entries and pages into one “blogsite”.
Many of my musings were simply the same posts on different sites, so i knew there would be some duplicates to be weeded out, and also a few that were really not (to quote Elaine from Seinfield) “spongeworthy”. By that i mean, they were either dealing with issues specific to the blog taken from or not interesting enough to be part of the mass merging of entries.
Part of the problem was trying to get all my old posts from the www.thatcomputerguy.org website which was recently redone with RapidWeaver into the http://www.thatcomputerguy.ca website which is created with WordPress. WordPress has the ability to import a lot of information in various formats from numerous other blogging programs, but not one specifically for importing the info from RapidWeaver. A little poking around on the web pointed me to a plug-in for RapidWeaver called RapidBlog. This plug-in gives you the ability to blog from anywhere using a Blogger account (once its all set up that is.) The nice thing about this was that my WordPress site (www.thatcomputerguy.ca in case you lost track) has the option to import from a blogger account built into it. Woo and Hoo i say.
I did the importing the long way, kinda. I had already imported some of my other WordPress blog entries (yes, another blogsite -that’s 3, and then blogger was the forth) into the Blogger account prior to using RapidBlog and manually syncing it to the Blogger account, which resulted in a number of duplicate blog entries when i imported into the .ca website. Most of the entires worked fine, some were missing images or tags, but nothing so far that i couldn’t remedy, i’m a pack rat when it comes to digital information and had retained many of the images used in the posts just-in-case. Even if I had not done that, its a simple process to copy the images from the other blogsite and insert them into this one.
I’m not big on change for changes sake, but i am taking the time to tweak the layout , the info, and the entries a bit as the merging occurs. It was good before, for the time i did it, it made sense and i liked it, but as with anything a fresh coat of virtual paint on your website can revitalize it and possibly renew interest, or as with a house, make you not want to move just yet. Time will tell, as i seem to be a bit of a cyber-nomad when it comes to my web presence, thankfully its much easier to pack up virtually and relocate or change – no boxes or moving trucks involved and i don’t have to bribe friends with pizza and beer to get help.
TCG
barkerp 