Note: My blog has moved to this URL. Please update all links, RSS feeds, and bookmarks.
So I signed-up with Blue Host as the new host for the blog — $7 per month with the domain name included. I also downloaded and then uploaded the WordPress platform, the Cutline theme that I had been using, the .xml file containing all of my blog data, and a WordPress plug-in to make Google Analytics very simple to install on every blog page.
However, there are still many issues. Using a WordPress platform on a blog not supported by WordPress itself makes things a little more difficult:
1. I need to work with the HTML code myself to make the blog appear as it did. For example, I cannot figure out how to upload and use a different header image — the one at my old blog — without completely messing up the layout.
2. If you click on an individual blog post, you can see all the past comments. But if you look at the main page, every post says it has no comments.
3. Only three post categories appear on the right-hand sidebar, but all of the relevant categories are listed above each individual post.
4. The XML-file transfer evidently did not include my blogroll, RSS feeds, or tags, so I think I’ll need to add those again by hand.
5. I no longer have the option to post a “Subscribe to this blog by e-mail” button, which I somewhat liked.
6. All of the codes to make Youtube videos appear automatically in a post no longer work; only the codes are there.
7. Perhaps most importantly (and frustratingly), I seem to have lost of my SEO work through keywords and link-building. Google’s robots and spiders might not have crawled my site yet, but I may have to start over. Blue Host had promised me that all links would redirect, but then they told me that I would have to ask WordPress to do that. So, for example, a Google image search for “Tel Aviv” brings up a picture on my old blog in the top spot — that brought a lot of readers. It does not bring them here even though that image with the keyword is on my new blog. It seems my new blog has zero credibility with Google, but perhaps it will just take time.
And that’s just a few of the issues. But I have been working on this for nine hours, and now it’s time to go to bed. More tomorrow.
