Aries DIY

The thing about being an Aries is that I think I can do everything myself and I rarely ever ask for help. Why wouldn’t I be able to transfer my blog, with no experience, in a day? Anyway, I did do it (!) but the tension in my upper back and neck is telling the tale.

Why I decided to move this blog from tumblr to WordPress (in excruciating detail)

First, I love tumblr. I have 3 blogs over there (dreamfix, mythstrology and astrofix@tumblr).

However:

• Tumblr is not made for text-heavy posts that require articulate navigation.
• There are no “categories” on tumblr, just tags.
• They only recently added “pages.”
• I had to manually construct a navigation system, and maintaining it was taking up too much of my time.
• Tumblr is a great tool for image blogs and blogs that collect bits and pieces of things. That’s what I thought AstroFix was going to be when I started it. I was wrong- in a good way :D The tumblr dashboard is easy to use and makes posting fun. I have a “share bookmarklet” that makes it so easy to post anything I find to my tumblrs.
• Moving tumblr to WordPress was not nearly the headache I thought it was going to be, except:
• There’s no way to import posts that were constructed with the “ask” function. Anyone who asked a question with “ask”- I had to delete those posts- but I saved copies. I haven’t decided whether or not to publish them again.

Although Disqus imported all my comments to the WordPress dashboard, it won’t sync them with the appropriate posts. I have 3 options:

1. Fuggetaboutit and start over- wah :’(

2. Manually re-enter each comment and state who each comment is from (for crying out loud!)

3. Submit a help ticket (I did, but I haven’t heard back yet) : /

The other weird thing about importing from tumblr is that the link, photo and quote posts don’t have titles, so, when I imported them I had over 200 blank categories with numbered “slugs.” I had to go through and give them all titles and add categories to everything (hours and hours of  fun *cough*).

• tags don’t import
• audio posts don’t import
• ask doesn’t import
• submit doesn’t import
• video doesn’t import (I deleted all of the embedded videos I had- fortunately there weren’t many)

So far I love my new WordPress blog.

I was surprised to see how quickly the spammers catch on. I’ve already had two spam comments. In the entire 6 months AstroFix was on tumblr I did not have one spam comment (just one spammy trackback).

My Google search hits are already way higher than on tumblr- in under 24 hours. I’d heard that WordPress was more “visible” and that tumblr was “hard to find.” I guess that’s true.

I still have to go through all the posts and check that the links work, and then fix all the images.

That’s my wrap-up of the process. It’s done, so now I know how to do it.

The end.

Thank yous

I’d like to give thanks to everyone who’s been supportive lately either through kind words or by mentioning AstroFix on their blog. I hope to return the favor soon.

Donna Cunningham @ SkyWriter

Julie Demboski

Karen @ Ravenesque

Diane @ Libra Seeking Balance

John Fellows

Katie @ Empowering Astrology