WordPress 2.7.1 is installed on both sites now although the automatic upgrade in WordPress seems to have failed. I used Dreamhost’s 1 click upgrade instead, which seems to have worked no problem (which is a nice change too). The 1 click upgrade may be the way to go in the future, we shall see.

Advertising seems to be hunting me down these days given the site seems to have a higher readership these days, and I am attempting to monetize my RSS feed a bit more. The RSS feed seems to be a bit of a dead leader when it comes to making money, so I am now inserting ads by hand into the feed just to see if that might help out. Have added Chapters Indigo, Quicktax, and BBC Canada to the list of advertisers.

I actually had a commenter mention how odd it was that I had Playboy on my list of ads, I thought it was interesting that someone actually even noticed, since I didn’t think anyone actually looked there. Good feedback to know.

The content continues to grow, with Video content on the weekend, and the occasional link by larger sites helping to keep the readership up.

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More strangeness with the Financial Site with my RSS feed from feedburner dieing off.  It is not just feedburner but the feed check utility also times out on my server, so I have sent yet another support request to my friends at Dreamhost. Meanwhile my Feedburner subscriber count drops like a stone thanks to my feed looking dead. This site’s RSS seems to be fine, so I am starting to wonder if maybe my WordPress has been hacked or the like, so there may be a new Theme on the Financial Site as well.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American Brother(s) (I actually have a brother who got his green card, and is now as American as it gets). Enjoy your Tur-Duck-En and your football (I will be).

WordPress 2.6.5 has been upgraded on both sites as well.

Epilogue

I must now apologize to Dreamhost since the problem seems to have been I had too many articles in my feed (20) and too much content and Feedburner says specifically that too big a feed is a problem too. I seem to have remedied this with the Most Humblest of Apologies to my friends at Dreamhost.

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I wrote this post to myself on my personal blog in February while I was attempting to transition from my old site on Blogspot to my new site at Dreamhost. At the end of it, I over thought it, and should have simply shut down the Blogspot site after a month and not worried about redirection, but for those who wish to bash their heads against a wall, feel free to learn from this mistake. 

301 Redirect from Blogspot Blog

So while attempting to follow all the in’s and outs for the 301 redirect set up I made many blunders but I think I now have an 85% solution.

Using the WordPress sitemap, I was able to get a list of most of the articles and the archives on the WordPress side of things. I mistakenly thought that the article naming would be the same from WordPress to Blogspot, however that was a huge error, but that is putting ahead of myself. Let’s see if I can remember each blunder as I made it.

• I had a list of links that all were of the form http://canajunfinances.com/????/??/??/<article title> which needed to have the site stripped off them and then the date stripped off before the title name so that it became /YEAR/MN/<article title> .
• I installed VIM (vi for windows) to do a lot of this.
• First I imported .xml sitemap file into Excel and then stripped out the unusable columns, leaving a single column of the format in the first bullet. I then duplicated that column so I had two columns and then saved the file in tab separated format.
• The error with using excel which then saved it, is that it broke a bunch of the longer lines into TWO lines, but I only figured that one out later.
• I opened the text file in VIM, and replaced the http://canajunfinances.com with what was needed to make Redirect 301 old-page-trail new-page-full-URL.
• So now I had a file with two columns with all of these 301 redirects which I then saved as .htaccess.
• On my web site I saved the existing .htaccess file in a BACKUP directory and then noted it had stuff in it already, so I appended all my redirects onto the end and tried it on my site. SERVER FAILURE messages came up. I put back the old .htaccess and the site came back.
• I then shot myself in the foot by accidently deleting a bunch of the files in my blog’s directory, spent 1/2 an hour piecing it back together. Don’t do that!
• Tried a few iterations of the .htaccess file, the first one with just the Month archives, which worked fine.
  • To test it you have to go to the BLOGSPOT publish section and point the BLOGSPOT blog to the new site. It is also easy to undo.

  I got bold and tried a bigger file and it failed.

• After trying that a few times, I then decided to test my .htaccess file on my home wordpress config on my local pc (no ftp involved and no danger of screwing up my real site).
• Tried full .htaccess file again, Server failure.
  • Removed most of the list, and the server was fine.
  • Added month at a time, and waited to get a failure, which I then found, after a few additions.
  • This is where I figured out that the command lines were getting broken into two lines with a ^M in them. Had to fix all of those (about 100 of them) by hand.
  • Once they were all fixed I had a complete file that did not cause my server to crash. Notice I didn’t say that worked right.

  Now that I had a .htaccess file that didn’t cause my server to crash I uploaded it to my WordPress site via FTP.

• Moved blogspot to point at my new site, month archives worked fine, so then I tried out some of my individual postings, and started getting Error 404 (article not found).
• Learned that Blogspot removes many common words from their posting addresses on line, such as “A”, “THE” and a few other, so by hand I removed those from a plethora (over 300) postings.
• Oh I also had to remove the DAY date from the postings earlier on as well (on EVERY posting, over 750).

I now have a working .htaccess that I sure does not work for every single posting, but should point most of the posts over from my old site. I need to create entries for categories, and other things as well.

Epilogue

It all worked eventually but I must have spent over 30 hours elapsed time on this, and at the end of it, I still ended up with a ZERO Page Rank for a while because Google thought I was attempting to double post the same content. 

I would suggest doing what I have done now, which is blow away the old blogspot site after a grace period, recreate it and have it have 1 post which points to your new site, and then use various tools to find all the links to your OLD site and ask the owners of the linking site to update their links to your new site. Might take a little less time, too!

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Canadian Financial Opinions the new site is now under construction and should be ready to rock in the very near future. I have had positive feedback from most of the folks who regularly read my stuff about the format, so go have a look and see what it looks like.

The new site is with DreamHost and uses WordPress as it’s publishing vehicle and I spent a good deal of the vacation tweeking and having fun setting the whole mess up. I got a very cheap rate for a year of hosting as well.

Click here and you get a really good discount on your first year (and extra disk space as an added bonus) if you choose to go with Dreamhost

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