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Transferring an Existing Site
May 28, 2005
It's been a somewhat productive day here. I've been working on an informational site that I've been meaning to move to a new server.
(This is the site that Yahoo loves but Google thinks is highly irrelevant and worthy of, oh, spot #9889 in the SERPs or thereabouts - I'm just kidding. I don't actually know where Google has it in the SERPs for my main keywords. All I know is that Google's not sending me very many visitors.)
I finally finished doing all the pages. Originally I was going with SSIs, but with my new (and not very vast at all) knowledge about php, it just seemed like it would be better to go with a php extension rather than html (or rather, shtml).
This decision resulted in my first tech glitch of the day. I couldn't figure out how to make my php stuff work with Nvu (which is a great little wyswyg program that's free). But I did a search, and realized HTML-Kit would do the trick. I downloaded the latest version, and I have to say, it's just wonderful.
For my Martell-style affiliate sites, using something like SEO Website Builder (and probably XsitePro - I still haven't created a site with it yet so I can't say for sure Edited, June 6: yes, it's easy to use) is much easier, with its "plug-in your content" ease, but my informational sites are trickier simply because I don't know just where I will be heading with them. In other words, I like to keep my options open, and in this case, the flexibility of HTML-Kit is definitely a bonus, in comparison to a wyswyg editor.
Since I have to put permanent redirects into place, I also went and wrote an .htaccess file. Hello, tech glitch no. 2. I uploaded it, in ascii, and then went to change the permissions - and it was nowhere in sight! This caused a small panic - I was all set to change my nameservers but wanted to have everything in place before I did. Where on earth did it disappear to?
It turns out that a lot of FTP clients, including mine (I use CuteFTP) don't display "hidden files" by default. And a lot of servers label files that begin with "." as "hidden". I was able to find the solution for my CuteFTP program here: Displaying Hidden Files.
But I'm not finished yet. Transferring an existing site is definitely a lot of work, especially if you're taking the opportunity to make site-wide changes. I just realized I'd better put up some custom error pages too, just in case. Let's just hope there aren't any more tech issues tonight.
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Posted by BJ at 11:40 PM in Web Publisher's Life, Website Design | Permalink
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Posted by: Mark | May 31, 2005 8:27:45 PM
