Over this weekend I started a new blog. The Freedom category on the inMessment blog has started to take on a life of its own. This new blog will help to set the Freedom category free to stand on its own.
I have learned a lot about blogging since I started inMessment. Finding a niche is a big part of having a successful blog. Over time I think both inMessment and HistoricWords will benefit from this split. HistoricWords will be very focused on its specific niche. inMessment will continue to have its five categories but I will not be posting any more Founding Fathers post here unless they really fit in.
If you have been following inMessment specifically for the Freedom posts, please check out HistoricWords.com and you can follow there.
Moving the Freedom Category to the New Blog
It was a pretty big process for me to start HistoricWords.com. Here are the basic steps I went through:
Choose Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is always a hard task for me. I tried sever variations on “history” and “writing”. Then I would check if the names I came up with were available. The first choice I wanted, “WrittenHistory” is not a valid website but it is held by a domain auction site. They are willing to sell it to me but I am not ready to pay at this time. I came up with “HistoricWords” and now I like it better than my first idea. I was able to register it for $16 and I own it for a year.
Set Up WordPress
Next I had to Install WordPress and set up the theme for the new blog. I used a lot of what I had done with inMessment. At this point I use the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll. It has an Export/Import feature that allowed me to start with the same settings I have on inMessment. From there I adjusted the color scheme and sizing to fit the new vision I have for HistoricWords.com.
Exporting an Importing The Freedom Category Posts
WordPress has an Export feature that will export your blog to an XML file. Then you can import it to another WordPress site. It has filtering options that allowed me to export only the posts in the Freedom category. The export includes everything about the posts, including any comments, so when I imported them on the new blog they looked the way they did on inMessment.
Cleaning up the Messy Parts
The import process brings in all the categories and tags from the first site, so I had to delete the ones I did not want on the new site an make sure the posts were categorized and tagged the way I wanted them. This was a somewhat tedious process.
I also had a lot of links to the inMessment blog in the posts. I started going through them one-by-one and then I thought there must be a better way. I searched the WordPress Plugin site and found a plugin that will do Search & Replace. This allowed me to search through all the posts and replace links and other things that I wanted to change.
Add Redirects For The Moved Posts
One of the big things to worry about when moving posts from one blog to another is Google and other search engines. I was starting to get a lot of search engine traffic for the Freedom posts. I did not want to loose these searches. The way to handle this is to create a “301 Redirect” for each post. A 301 Redirect does two things, it redirect the old URL to a new URL and it notifies the user that the URL has been permanently change. Google and other search engines will take 301 Redirect and update their indexes.
I found another WordPress Plugin called Redirection which does exactly this. I started creating a single redirect for each post and again I thought, there must be a better way. After a little thought, I recategorized each post from Freedom to “Redirect to HistoricWords”. Then I was able to use the regular expression feature (really geeky stuff) of the Redirection Plugin to redirect any post in that category to the new blog. Then all I had to do was change the category on each post and the redirects were done.
There are lots of other tweaks and I am sure I will come across other issues, but those are the major steps I went through. Check out HistoricWords.com and let me know what you think.
