How to Port Your Blog from TypePad to WordPress (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of a 2-part post on migrating your blog from TypePad to WordPress. << Part 1

While the information in this post uses TypePad as the subject. much is transferable to other platforms.

Part 1 discussed overall migration considerations, preparing for the move, exporting data from TypePad, Importing data into WordPress, cleaning up images and file references, and taking advantage of some of WordPress’s features.

Redirect Traffic to your New Blog

If you’re going to drop any traffic, it’s going to happen right here!

1. Make sure the receiving server is ready for traffic.
2. Go to your domain registrar, and point your domain to the nameservers on your new hosting account or server. You’ll probably also have to delete the MX records that still exist.
3. Wait.
4. Ping your domain name to see which IP address responds, TypePad or your new server. As soon as the responding IP address is your new server, continue.
5. In your WordPress administrative panel, go to Options | General, and make sure your blog is pointing to your domain name, and not the temporary URL or IP address you used to setup your WordPress blog. If you’re using a new domain, this step doesn’t apply to you. Important: don’t perform this step until you know your domain is pointed to your server or you’ll lose access to your administrative panel. If this does happens to you, just open up your MySQL database, and update the entry in the wp_options table.
6. After cutover, go to your TypePad control panel and select Site Access | Domain Mapping. Remove your domain mapping. This step doesn’t need to be done, but I prefer to make a clean break.

DNS is painful. You need to coordinate different servers in different locations, and you can never be sure if what you see is what someone else will see (until propagation completes). So when something goes wrong, it’s often hard to pinpoint where the problem is. If you do things in the above order, you shouldn’t run into any problems. [Read more]

How to Port Your Blog from TypePad to WordPress (Part 1)

This is Part 1 of a 2-part post on migrating your blog from TypePad to WordPress. Part 2 >>

While the information in this post uses TypePad as the subject. much is transferable to other platforms.

You’re reading this post for one of several possible reasons:

• You’re looking into moving your TypePad blog to a self-hosted WordPress version, and you want to know what to expect
• You’re in the process of moving your blog, and something isn’t going right or something appears a bit wonky
• You’ve already moved your blog, and you want to make sure you’ve dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s
• You like me and you’re bored

When Quick Migrations Get Ugly

I have good news and bad news for you. Migrating to WordPress is incredibly easy (for the most part). And for most people, it should be a relatively simple move, even if some parts can get rather tedious:

• If you’ve hacked TypePad with any custom styles, stripping out the remnants of those styles can be painful
• If you have a large number of posts, error checking can be tedious
• If your posts are thoroughly cross-linked, you’ll have to re-link them
• If you’ve used a lot of photos in your posts, you’ll have to re-reference them and create your own thumbnails

That was the good news. The bad news is that to minimize downtime, to make sure your feed is available to your readers, and to ensure that you maintain your page rank after the move, you will have to jump through some hoops. So the physical migration itself is easy — moving your content from one blog on one server to a new blog on another server — but attending to the other concerns is what could cause you some headaches. If you have a high page rank, and want to maintain it, you’ll have to jump through some hoops. If you want to minimize site and feed downtime, be prepared for a little extra work.

There are many other smaller considerations, but the above are what consumed most of my effort. At the risk of stating the obvious, you probably noticed that characteristics of larger, more active blogs lend themselves to the more difficult migrations. Even still, I wouldn’t expect the total migration time to exceed 15 to 20 hours. For smaller, simpler installations, 1 hour would seem like an eternity.

Another thing I’d like to point out before going further is that I’m assuming that you’re going to be transferring a domain name along with porting your blog. That is, your TypePad blog is available at http://yourblog.com, and it should maintain that address when the migration is complete. If you’re moving from http://youraccount.typepad.com to http://yourblog.com, then the process is far simpler, because you won’t need to worry about the DNS propagation lags. Of course, you’ll also lose any page rank (at least temporarily) that you’ve worked to achieve, so understand that before you go in. [Read more]

Feedburner RSS feed updated + server optimization tip

Well, it appears that the last thing to get updated was the Feedburner feed. Although the cutover from Typepad to WordPress was smooth, with only a few minutes interruption in service, apparently the DNS changes didn’t propagate fully enough to satisfy Feedburner.

If you ever get messages like “The domain does not seem to exist” or “There was a problem retrieving the feed: java.net.UnknownHostException” a possible cause is DNS propagation (I surmise). Feedburner’s help recommends pinging, resynching, validating your feed, and so on, but for me, all it took was a little time — roughly 18 hours.

Which reminds me, I recently wrote an interesting piece on server optimization, specifically preparing for and responding to high traffic. Doing research for that article, I was shocked to find out what a drain on bandwidth and server resources an RSS feed can be. I ran across a large number of cases where it was estimated that anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the load and bandwidth was due to the constantly polling feed aggregators. Offloading your feeds to a service like Feedburner, or even to another hosting account or server, can have a noticeable impact. I’ll review some other tips that I ran across in the coming week or two.

Thanks for your patience during cutover, and thanks to John and RJ for helping test out the feeds.