NaturallyCarolicious.com Is Live

One of my WordPress projects was helping a friend move her blog from TypePad over to a self-hosted WordPress with a shiny new domain name: naturallycarolicious.com.  As of today she's made the official "welcome" post, and the new site is running like a champ.  She's still some design stuff, but that's just icing on the cake.

Biggest problem was that she was using a TypePad subdomain instead of a custom domain, which precluded any sort of transparent switch-over via DNS.  TypePad also doesn't have a half-way between drag'n'drop themes and roll-your-own, which meant that changing the site header to include a redirect was out.  So I had to resort to JS, which is hardly elegant, but it works well enough.  I was really hoping for .htaccess support, but pushing one up there had no effect, so they don't have it enabled in their Apache (or whatever) config.  Oh well.  Unfortunately this means search engines have to organically rebuild their indexes (since I can't give them a 301), but a robots.txt will at least ensure the old stuff drops out.

Once all that was sorted, however, things went pretty smoothly.  Found a great WordPress plugin for doing search and replace within your content, which made updating internal links a breeze.  It also happens to output search results in a fashion that was really easy to rip with jQuery into a list of files (pics, movies, etc) to grab with wget and then bulk upload into WordPress.  And let me tell you, bulk uploading into WordPress is kickass; Flash for the win!

Did a little minor theme work, changed permalinks to only use year/month/slug (to match TypePad), and that's about it.  Smooth as butter.

Welcome home, Carole.