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New home for this blog
Tonight I'm cutting over to the InfoWorld server. I regenerated the old verson of this site with pointers to the new location (above the navlinks). There will be some glitchiness I'm sure. In particular, I have to go over to the new place now and see about getting the RSS channels and items to link to the right place.
OK, done. Here are some observations:
- When you go back and forth between Radio's native xmlstoragesystem and an external FTP site -- as I've done several times during this exercise -- you have to apply the fix Lawrence documented each time you revert to the native mode.
- Each time you switch Radio does a complete upload.
- The <%headlinks%> macro failed when I went to the new location, producing:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://localhost:8080/rss.xml">
instead of the expected:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/rss.xml">
No big deal. It only occurs once, so I can just hardcode it if need be.
PS: Seems to have fixed itself. I would say you should plan to upload fully at least twice before concluding that something has not worked.
- It's cool that the rankings and referrals, both keyed to my usernum, continue working right through the transition.
- If you change the main template and regenerate your old site with a message pointing to the new site, remember to change it back when you regenerate the new site.
- I wish I could insert into UserLand's Apache the one mod_rewrite directive that would redirect everything to the new site :-)
- If you hardcode your site address anywhere, you'll get burned. I did this in a few places. For example, I had:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/2002/03/16/storylist.html
instead of:
<%radio.weblog.getUrl()%>stories/2002/03/16/storylist.html
- If you use GoogleBox, it'll recompute for every regenerated page. This was a bit of a drag, because I like to have each day's GoogleBox relate uniquely to something on that page. That'll be true going forward, but I've lost the historical searches. I might want to try a variant of GoogleBox that only recalcs recent pages.
- The channel and item links in my RSS files were pointing to the old site from the new site's feeds. That was because the RSS files aren't rewritten until you post something new. Once you do, they'll catch up.
PS: It seems theory was wrong. This category RSS file, for example, was updated even though no new postings were made to the category. So now I'm not sure what went wrong initially, and what it went right subsequently.
PPS: But look at this one, and this one! Go figure.
- I seem to have screwed up the old RSS file along the way. I really wish there were a way to replace its contents with:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/rss.xml">
As it stands, this might be the most disruptive part of the whole operation. Subscribers to the feed (evidently there are a goodly number) will need to resubscribe at the new address (standard version with short descriptions, alternate version with long ones). Come to think of it, there might be a way to make Radio upload an RSS file containing the redirect. But I can't face doing the experiment at 2:30AM...
- On the bright side, anyone who watches weblogs.com will pick up on the new location immediately. In fact, to avoid confusion while switching back and forth, I probably should have turned it off and then back on again.
- The local search isn't wired up to the new site yet. There's a robots.txt file on the infoworld server that blocks the spider. Hopefully, it can be modified.
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NEWS 
