« Hi, Anna! | Main | Comments Back Open »
January 28, 2005
Merging Two Blogs -- Suggestions?
As you may know, three friends and I ran GearBits, a tech-oriented blog, for about 15 months. In June, we put it on hiatus because real life was getting in the way of our posting (darn you, real life!). Since then, I've started this personal blog on my home machine, but I'd like to somehow combine them so that what was posted on GearBits isn't lost.
GearBits was run using Movable Type 2.66, which was free for multi-author, non-profit blogs, and is hosted on a friend's machine (thanks, Hal!). This blog is powered by Movable Type 3.x, which is not free for multi-author blogs, and is hosted on my own webserver at home. I don't really want to have to pay just to keep archived material in its original form, but I would like to retain its structure.
Also, GearBits got, and still gets, a fair bit of traffic, so I'd like to serve those readers with some new content. But, I don't want to have to maintain two separate blogs. Does anyone have a solution/suggestion for migrating GearBits?
Comments
Don't worry about the multi-user portion. IIRC, they count *active* users for that very reason.
The bigger problem might be the actual moving. You could use the import/export. However, that will simply move the content. It *won't* necessarily keep the file structure. As such, search engines would be pointing the wrong place.
If I were you... I would export the *new* blog to a file system. Completely move the old blog over. Upgrade the old blog to 3.15. Start a new blog and import the new blog into the old blog. Wow that was confusing....
Posted by: steve ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.gearbits.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 28, 2005 12:16 PM
[scratches head] Ummm, uh huh. OK. :-) I'll chew on that for a while, Steve.
I wonder if I could simply mirror my old blog on my own server and then change the DNS information to redirect traffic there. Hmm...that might work in the short run.
Posted by: craigf at January 29, 2005 10:47 AM
OK OK OK -- I fear that I was a little vague. The main problem comes down to the fact that GearBits archived pages based on an internal post count (e.g. 00342.html). Unfortunately, this number has nothing to do with the post itself. It is merely a bookkeeping number used by MT to ensure that each post is unique. If you were to export Gearbits (from its current location) and import it into your current installation of MT, those numbers would start building based on the internal count of your current installation. Stated succinctly, every post would get a different permalink. All links to your site would be broken and, at least in the short-term, search engines would be referring to broken links.
Your new site doesn’t have this problem (as its permalinks and determined by title name). So…
You can export your personal site (using the export function).
Replace your personal site with the entire Gearbits installation (DB and all).
Upgrade that installation to 3.15
Import your personal site into the newly upgraded MT.
Am I making any sense to anyone?
Posted by: steve at January 29, 2005 2:47 PM
yeah, i think i get where you're going. i'll have to play around with stuff and see if it works as theorized. thanks for the suggestions, steve.
Posted by: craigf at January 29, 2005 5:27 PM