Why changing a Google blogger domainname is a BAD idea?

Posted in Hacking, Hosting, Webdesign, Coding & DTP

As announced earlier I just migrated from my old domain to https://rhyker2u.blog Let me share with you — in nerdy language — what went HORRIBLY wrong during migration:

although you can alter the domainname, the resolving of all the old domainnames is still inside the posts. You can either change that manually, or do a search & replace with the exported XML, and reimport. So far the theory! Cause that doesn’t work in the real world; the minute you reimport (although you’ve deleted the previous blogposts), google recognises it as new content, and as such creates new URLs for all blogposts. Meaning? Whatever .htaccess script you write for old blog URLs is NOT going to work. The only way to make it work is to create a new blog, and then import.
However, none of the imports will be published automatically. That’s something that has to be done by hand. Thank god, not per post, but per page of 100. Which in my case was 10 mouse clicks. However …
It also posts ALL drafts … Not something you want. Especially cause not all drafts had SEO compatible titles. Easy to fix to delete and recreate, either move back to drafts. But again … quite the nuisance!
New blog, so you’ll also lose ALL blogview, post tracking & Google Analytics. But there’s another side effect:
When you create a new post, it generates a modrewrited URL based on the post title (automatically). After, you can always alter the title but the modrewrited url stays the same. This is a great trick for getting more exposure on your links, however when you import content? It regenerates the modrewrite links based on the title, meaning you will lose the original link. ARGH! No problemo, right? The 404 page will fix that; WRONG! It seems to be stuck in an infinite loop 50% of the time. But yes … of course there’s a quickfix for that too;
creating custom redirects under “Settings” -> “Search Preferences” in blogger.com/home, but that creates more work So far, created about 14 redirects of often used posts. Probably have to create more overtime, because …
for some reason the import messes with the original posting dates. I published my mac apps of March last week, and for some reason it has moved to the 1st of February 2012. Strange!
Next issue … blog export saved posts, but not blog pages, neither layout, favicon, and template settings. Funnily enough it used to do exactly that with custom templates I’ve used, however not in dynamic view.

There’s also good news. In the migration preparations I wrote a PHP redirect is not going to work? Well I was wrong. You can either use this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !rhyker2u.blog$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://blog.tell-a-few.com/

or … what I used after changing the DNS settings:

header(‘Location: http://old.tell-a-few.com’.$_SERVER, TRUE, 301);

How long it took to migrate? Hmm about 3-4 hours. Still fast whehehe. It helps when you know what you’re doing Still … if you run a commercial blog (instead of a wiki)? You better think twice before migrating!

P.S. imagine what would happen when migrating to Google Apps for Business? That would also change all the URLs of the pictures! Pffff. Google isn’t making migration easy, or I’m doing something very wrong

Update March 31, 2012: The problem is still getting bigger. The images of the old blog are stored into a separate picasa web album, that cannot be modified. Or can it? Found some good information: http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189356