Migrating the Blog Part - 0

Posted on 2 mins read

It has been a journey, one that took a long time. A journey that took much longer than I had hoped, but now it is time to document how I migrated everything from my previous blog over to its new home.

This is going to be a series of smaller posts - I have found that breaking these steps into smaller steps is easier to consume, and understand and easier for me to explain.

This first post - is going to go over the high level of the steps that I needed to implement, so that I could move the blog and each subsequent post will go into more detail for that specific step.

The blog was originally hosted on Blogger - for a number of a number of reasons - mostly historical. Basically I started somewhere - and never found a good enough reason to change the platform. It served me well, it was free. It did have its limitations, but I learned how to live with them, get around them and I was fine with that. You can find some more detail about that in Part - 1.

I decided to go with a different domain name, one that was more aligned with my current work, and my focus (until now - I was using a shared subdomain FQDN - that Google provided by default).

These are the stages that I laid out for myself that needed to allow me to complete in order for to migrate the blog to a new home.

  1. Get a new domain name, find somewhere to host the blog and decide on which platform I would use instead of Blogger.
  2. Export all the content out of Blogger - so that I could import into the new site.
  3. Implement a new blog design.
  4. Import all the content into the new site.
  5. Fix up content issues. Here I had a great amount of technical debt that I wanted to remove.
    • My images were historically hosted in multiple locations (my domain, or other free services). I wanted to consolidate all of the content into a single location - under my ownership and my control.
    • Code from my blog posts - were located in a number of places (github, Blogger). The format was not standard, and I wanted to improve this point as well.
  6. Redirect all the content from the old site to the new - without causing too much havoc.

Let’s see how I accomplished this.

On to part #1