We have a moon landing!

If you are seeing this blog entry, it means you have successfully landed on the new ToTehMoon web site. You may notice in the footer that it is now powered by Blogger instead of Wordpress. After several years of running my own virtual server on LiquidWeb, I decided to move over to hosting with Google. I used to run several sites on my virtual server and it was great having direct access to the server, the ability to setup and control email accounts on the fly, etc. However, what is not so great is the cost to do so. In the scheme of things, the cost was not really that much, but since I have three kids in high school and was really down to only one site, it was time to rethink that expense.


I actually started the process about a month ago when I migrated the site over to Blogger. That involved moving three different installs of WP that I had running, all powering different portions of my site on the old server, over to Blogger. That went relatively smoothly and I now have all three blogs merged into this one blog. However, you will notice that most of the image links are broken. The migration process only pulls over the text and related post content via an xml file.

I have copied all of the image files off the old server and uploaded them to my Google Drive account. From there, they should be porting over to my G+ photos account and using that, I can (re)insert them into the blog. One hiccup I ran into though is that the Drive --> Photos link does not pick up png files, which I have a lot of. So I need to figure out something to do about that. And unfortunately, the process of going back and replacing all the images will be a manual process. I did find one way that would work using Dropbox, but I wanted to try to keep everything consolidated on Google even though it will be more work. I'm also not sure what is going to happen with all the image galleries. Those mainly involve MINI events from a few years ago and WP had some interesting ways to construct those.

Besides updating my domain records to now point to this new blog, I'm working on deploying Google Apps for Business so I can restore email service on the totehmoon.com domain. Even paying for that ends up being cheaper for a whole year than the old server was for one month.

Now that I have something relatively shiny and new, perhaps I'll be prompted to do a little more writing.