I am pretty sure this covers everything from the old Blogger-published site.

# root index page
Redirect permanent /index.shtml /wp/index.php

# Blogger's year-month archive pages
RedirectMatch permanent /([0-9]+)_([0-9]+)_[0-9]+_archive\.shtml /wp/$1/$2

# Blogger's 'label' (tag) pages; labels were not changed to tags
# in migration, so redirect to a WP search for that word
RedirectMatch permanent /labels/(.*)\.shtml /wp/index.php?s=$1

# this works on all post pages except where Blogger 'helpfully' omitted words
RedirectMatch permanent /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9a-zA-Z-]+)\.shtml /wp/$1/$2/$3

For those posts where the post-pages published by Blogger omitted words from the title in the filename, the last redirect would result in a 404 (Blogger would tend to omit “a”, “an”, “the” and other small words from titles when creating post-pages). So I’ve installed the Smart 404 plugin (and hacked the code a bit, of course) to auto-suggest a matching post and/or search for keywords.

Suggestions and comments welcome!

I am (finally) working on redirecting everything from the old blog to the new, beautiful, WordPress blog. That involves a lot of fiddling with .htaccess Redirect rules and I’m a little worried that some regular expressions may creep in there. So far, all the monthly archive pages are redirected, so http://www.project-insomnia.com/2003_07_01_archive.shtml (which represents the Blogger-published archive of the first month’s worth of posts from the blog) will automatically redirect to http://www.project-insomnia.com/wp/2003/07. The tricky bit is going to be redirecting the post-pages, that is, the pages for each individual post, and I’m afraid that is where I’m going to need some regexp magic.

Progress is being made, slowly, ever slowly, but progress nonetheless.

(If you visited the new blog after the switchover and now note that things have changed again, yes, I changed templates to one that actually works. Learning curve.)

Aren’t “new” and “improved” mutually exclusive? That always bothered me. Anyway, with Blogger dropping support for ftp publishing I have moved to a self-hosted WordPress instance and migrated all 1,343 posts over. Unfortunately, comments in Haloscan didn’t make it and I’m not sure they can be migrated at all–but I’m still looking at that*. Meanwhile, WordPress has its own very nice commenting system.

The URL for new posts will be http://www.project-insomnia.com/wp/ for a while, until I do some cleaning and straightening in the root.

Feeds are in your browser’s address bar and there’s an actual, working site-search tool in the upper left corner for your convenience. If you see anything that needs fixing, please let me know in comments. I do know that some photos attached to posts didn’t make it across.

*Followup: Haloscan “upgraded” to a new paid service around the same time as Blogger discontinued their ftp support. Old comments are not transferable.

(The following is the last post from the old Blogger-published site. With the automatic redirects now in place, it’s no longer accessible; trying the original link will result in a 404 and not-very-helpful search results. The post is therefore archived here for reference with the original publish date.)

Moving Day

This blog is managed on Blogger’s platform but published by ftp to my own server. Blogger has served notice that they are ending support for publishing by ftp, and the deadline is May 1.

Given past issues (and no, I never did migrate after that incident) I’m not about to hand over full hosting to Google. I’ve installed a self-hosted WordPress instance thanks to the one-click magic of DreamHost’s control panel and have migrated all posts (except this one) to the new system. This post right here will be the final post from Blogger.

The temporary new address for Project Insomnia is: http://www.project-insomnia.com/wp/

I need to do some cleaning up before I can have the WordPress instance running in the root, so for now it’ll be in the /wp subdirectory. I’ll also have to choose and/or customize a WordPress template, install some plugins and generally update things now that we’re firmly in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Thanks for reading and I hope you continue doing so during and after the transition.
Labels: administrivia, blog, blogger, dreamhost, news, wordpress

(Another note: despite what I said in the above post, I’m probably keeping the blog in the /wp subdirectory.)