• scissors
    February 8th, 2017HARTHART-Empire Network, reorganization

    All my sites are completely hosted in Canada now. Woohoo!



    Last June 2016 I moved one of my hosting accounts from Bluehost (affiliate link) to SKGOLD (affiliate link) Hosting, here in Canada. I documented this and mentioned which sites were moved in this blog post www.hart-empire.com/2016/06/24/tip-how-to-fix-an-error-occurred-while-processing-this-directive/.

    Well .. I had 4 other accounts at Hostgator (affiliate link) that were expiring all around the same time at the end of the year December 31, 2016, and my goal to move them to Canada was the same. Beginning November 15, 2016 I started to move each of these account to the Canadian hosting company SKGOLD finalizing my choice on Black Friday November 24, 2016 when they were offering a 2-for-1 hosting sale for the first year! Since the move .. I haven’t really done anything, except clean up the four accounts with respect to plugins, loading times, and other fix other issues that may have come up after moving .. since, one of the accounts was my bloated “PetLvr” (LVR) group of sites that have been going on since May 2005 and has over 6,700 posts and a huuuuuuuge database!

    I am also in the process of converting most of the sites from blogs – which, my blogging hasn’t really really much to talk about in the past few years – to “E-commerce Stores with Blogs”. I have been testing platforms and cleaning up old stores in my “Shops of HART Market” stores, and testing new themes. I also noticed that in doing many of my clean up and changes that some (or, all of a few certain regular themes that I have been using) appear to be broken. My plan is to first decide on the BEST theme to use, that mimick’s my entire HART EMPIRE NETWORK philosophy, and standardize one theme for everything! At least, that is my plan.

    In the meantime .. I hope you are patient with me … my goal is to have everything ready by “Back To School” time … (I am an accountant during the day and gearing up for income tax season and year ends).

    PS: And, speaking of moving 100% of my 57 sites and domains from Bluehost/Hostgator to the Canadian Server SKGOLD HOSTING … if you are looking for some helpful advice on making the move yourself .. here’s a site and person that got in touch with me and has a site just willing to do that! His guides and reviews are very helpful or, at least gives you something to think about when pursuing more information.

    One caution, as pointed out in the disclaimer of his website:

    Disclosure: Our website receives compensation from the companies whose products we recommend and because of it, we are able to provide Free help with setting up your blog. We tested and used most of the web hosting sites and domain registrars recommended here.

    ( i.e. most links related to hosting and domain reviews are affiliate linked, and they will make a commission if you sign up through their links, and will generally override previously clicked links or referrals from other sources before you click over here. Don’t get me wrong – this is common around the internet to help support bloggers and website to providing and maintaining information, like this, that is generally helpful and useful and around when you need it!)

    Check them out! If you chat with anyone from that site, or with their Social Media accounts … tell ’em HART sent you!

    firstsiteguide.com/change-hosting/

    “…. the guide intended for web newbies to explain the terminology, issues and procedures they need to know in order to successfully transfer their website from one host to another.

  • scissors
    June 24th, 2016HARTHART-Empire Network, reorganization

    Floridaserversfront1

    I have been on the internet and with websites since March 1995 and blogging since May 2005. I started small with local hosting platforms, and then expanded each to a point where I consolidated all my sites and blogs to a super dedicated server in May 2007. By 2012 I began to downsize and broke up my dedicated server into 5 separate and smal and cheaper shared hosting accounts … one at BLUEHOST (affiliate link) and four at HOSTGATOR (affiliate link). Both Bluehost and Hostgator (and a bunch of other hosting companies) are all owned by the same “Endurance International Group” and that always irked me.

    My Bluehost server holds about 20-25% of my sites, and expires July 29, 2016 but I decided to move all my sites to Canadian servers when one of the sites had a little traffic this month and Bluehost deactivated my account. It turned out to be an old plugin I had (Spam Karma 2) that I never removed that was causing the problems and my account was reactivated right away – but, with the US Exchange rate rising .. I finally decided to move my sites back to a Canadian Hosted server. My Hostgator sites are not renewed until December 31, 2016 so I plan to just move those over the fall at the convenience of my time.

    SKGOLD HOSTING aka CANADIAN WEB HOSTING

    After review and talking to various other people I respect, I decided to go with SKGOLD HOSTING (affiliate Link). If you want to read up on the, and considering your own move of servers .. check them out: www.skgoldhosting.com/about.html (no affiliate link)

    These are the sites I moved … how are they doing? I notice they are not slow or downtime like they were on Bluehost … but – I just got them migrated today 😀

    1800hart.com
    1800hart.tv
    2yrd.com
    62-151.com
    abitpac.com
    andyouwill.com
    andyouwill.net
    andyouwill.org
    battlingforhealth.com
    battlingforhealth.net
    battlingforhealth.org
    bettesinger.com
    callhart.com
    hart-empire.com (this site)
    hart-empire-network.com
    hart-network.com
    hartleybsinger.com
    hbsmc.com
    jmskwared.com
    singer-empire.com
    singer-network.com
    the-singers.com

    MIGRATING TO ANOTHER SERVER IS HELL

    Migrating to another server is hell .. if you have to do it yourself, or expensive if you have to pay another to do it for you. However, if you have access to the cPanel .. (and especially if you subscribe to a daily backup application like “Site Pro Backup”) the cPanel has an option to make a FULL CPANEL BACKUP. What this does, is creates a backup in a .tar.gz format of all your files, databases, settings, add-ons, and well, everything! that is in your old server, that your new server can come and scoop and download and install into the new server.

    For my Bluehost account – it took about 48 hours to get their technical support to finally make a good and full cPanel backup that wasn’t corrupt and was in a compressed mode (which took extra time) and ended up being about 15.13 GB in size. Restoration on the new server took about 4 hours to download in the first place, and that was about midnight … and by 10am this morning most of the sites were up and running.

    [an error occurred while processing this directive]

    I was finding out that when I went to about half of the sites .. I was getting the above message – especially when I tried to log in to the dashboard of my wordpress files to update plugins and such and give a good test.

    Here is how to fix this problem:

    * Make a backup or in your FTP program rename your .htaccess file to something like .htaccess-before-move-hosting
    * Go to SETTINGS.
    * Go to PERMALINKS.
    * Notice which settings you have – (usually “postname” or “month/name”)
    * Choose PLAIN and common settings for Permalinks and SAVE.
    * Then, re-select your original “postname” (or whatever) setting and SAVE

    That’s pretty much it. What this does is create or overwrite the existing .htaccess file and make it work with the server and site. You should be cautious however, and compare what was created with the .htaccess-before-move-hosting file, to see if you need to add or modify the existing file with extra security and safety features.

    Your Welcome!

    HART

    ~~~~~~~
    image source: Wikipedia

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  • scissors
    November 18th, 2009HARTHmmmm Things, reorganization

    The father of an 11-year child on Facebook has given me some concern to rethink my “Facebook” activity. The father is a “Friend” in real life and his children is on facebook and they also “Friend”‘ed me.

    In conversation with the father yesterday, he mentioned that the child was concerned because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings .. apparently I am spamming him! He is just getting started on Facebook, and although he might have over 100 friends himself .. I’m his only friend that posts more than once a day.

    Actually – I just looked – over one 24 hour period – I have published 23 posts on Facebook! I think looking backwards and forward, the posts in any given day could amount between 20-35 extra posts, depending on how much extra time I have to write and create new content and promote them!

    As you can see there are a lot of posts! Of the 23 posts .. 8 of them are manually posted by me either on Facebook, or via Twitter which is posted automatically to twitter. The rest are automated posts to my twitter account either directly from my blogs and their feeds, and/or manually posted from my SU.PR account which, posts to Facebook and Twitter separately, so when the twitter post goes through – it posts twice to Facebook! (There were 2 instances of this above).

    I’m guessing that probably NONE of them really were really interesting to my Friend’s 11-year old child and while we are friends and able to keep in touch in Facebook, I don’t expect him to be a reader of my blogs et al.

    My plan is to get my content out there .. to market my stuff, market myself, and find new traffic. But, I already know that I am on the cutting edge with my blogs. I monetize them to the max. I try to promote the posts to the max. I have a popup trying to obtain newsletter subscribers to the max. I post all of my posts directly to twitter to the max. I’m a “Maxxie” type of guy!! (my Papillon dog is named Maxxie! :D)

    Well .. good news – I don’t have my @HARTmarket twitter account posting here to Facebook. If I did .. it would post another 60-70 more posts a day!!

    About Facebook Fan Pages

    I’ve been on Facebook for a while, and have a slew of friends without even using Facebook (or, was that a gaggle of friends? a flock of friends?) Anyway, When I finally decided that I really wanted FAN Pages and set up 5 fan pages for each section of my network of blog sites … I really did not know what to do with my “Personal Account” to which the fan pages are attached to! At first, I had all these NEW friend requests, and ignored them hoping to only get fans. But, I wanted to follow people back, and they do not all have Fan pages themselves! If I were to follow interesting people on Facebook, then I would have to add them as a friend to do that. The next thing you know, I just started accepting all friend requests and even sought out friends myself!

    Something Has To Be Done

    In the next week or so, I am going to try figuring out a better way to not spam my Facebook readers, while still trying to get the word out – so to speak. I think I learned my lesson now. I have only been tying into the Facebook crowd since post-summer 2009 and have a lot to figure out. Questions that I am concerned with right now are:

    1) Do I really need to replicate twitter updates over on facebook?
    2) Do I really want to replicate twitter updates over on facebook?

    Granted, I might have a lot more sites than the average person on Facebook, but how do other people manage their facebook profiles?

    Feel free to offer me some sage advice, tips and suggestions! // Thanks… HART

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  • scissors
    July 5th, 2009HARTreorganization

    Greetings and Salutations .. again~

    I’m trying to resurrect this blog. The original purpose was to discuss the inner makings of things that affected me and the HART-Empire Network. The HART-Empire-Network.com blog, which is the HOME of the HART-Empire Network online .. is meant to keep track of the news of my network. I currently have the code setup in widgets in each of my blogs, and – like you see in this sidebar in the section “HART-Empire Network: News” .. I am importing new posts from that blog to every blog simultaneously. I do this, so where there is news .. I can make one post and broadcast it to all my sites at once.

    I’m using the WP-RSSImport Plugin to retrieve posts from HART-Empire-Network.com and broadcast it on all my sites instantly. At the time of writing, I had upgraded to the latest version 4.4 however, there is a current conflict that creates database wordpress errors everytime I post – so, I have downgraded back to version 4.3 or 4.2.1 around my network to avoid the conflict. This conflict had affected me in both wordpress version 2.7.1 and version 2.8. I have decided to NOT figure out which two plugins are creating conflicts for me, and wait for another upgrade in the plugin.

    This is an H3 Chapter Title!

    This is an H4 Chapter Title!

    This is an H5 Chapter Title!

    I just installed this new template the other day and testing. I did manage to remove that awful black formatting in the sidebar – WHEW! It was stylized to be black with white text on all links … I changed that to a slightly lighter yellow color, and switch to green when you hover over the links. Not perfect, but a fix that I approve!

    NEW DIRECTION OF THE HART-EMPIRE BLOG

    As time passes by, I am finding that I am not moving to different servers anymore or often, nor have I been publishing the monthly revenue and expenditures of my online activites. As a result, this blog seems to be slowly deteriorating. I plan to stop this from happening.

    Currently …

    * Feedburner Feed Count show that I have 23 subscribers of my RSS
    * Feedburner Email Subscriptions shows that I have 0 subscribers of my RSS via email
    * PR=0 or unranked
    * Alexa rating is 1,214,675

    Implementations …

    * New template
    * DO FOLLOW – on comments
    * CommentLuv – shows your last post in your blog when you do comment

    Still In Progress ..

    Ugh. Tags … Most of my archives do not have tags associated with the post. I also used to have a gabillion categories. I have cleaned up some of the categories, combined them, and added a few tags … but it will never be complete. Ideally, I would like to just go to my archives and DELETE old posts, but I believe they build character to this blog. There are many nonsense “quickie” and “Hmmmm” type of posts, that may seem like nothing but crawl forward to inspiration of major posts in this blog that I believe deserves to remain intact. Now, if I delete all of the “muse” and leave the “meat” .. will they still make sense? I’m not sure – so, I have decided to leave it.

    Stuff I’d Like To See In This Blog

    By far, this is nowhere near to be a complete list, but only a partial list of ideas that I hope to maintain and blog about over time:

    1) HART’s DAILY TASKS – My HART-Empire Network “to do” list. Although, these may not actually take me a day to perform them .. I would classify these tasks as something necessary part of the operation of my network of sites, that take less than 24 hours to do 🙂 such as .. making sure I am backing up every blog up, updating plugins around the network, upgrading to latest wordpress versions, etc. It could also be simple things to do – like, run to Canadian Tire and get some more water for my water machine in my office!

    My goal is to get things done – and maybe teach by example, of what I do that might spark ideas or assist others in getting things done as well

    2) WEEKLY sweet-HART POSTS – It’s catching on .. with all my social media contacts and friends, I help promote a lot of my friends and acquaintances blogs each day, week in and week out. I hope to link out to the special posts that come my way. I’ll try not to interfere with some other “Fetching Friday” or “Feeding Frenzy Saturday” .. and might gear this for either a Monday or Tuesday post – with the cutoff from the last week ending Sunday.

    My goal is to showcase some of the best stuff out there, that I see everyday when I stumble and/or RT on twitter

    3) HOW HART MAKES MONEY – Although I am not actually posting my earnings anymore each month .. it is still publicly accessible, as I have not been deleting any of my archives! Although, I should say that I am not current in updating the 2009 figures and slow in breaking it down by ‘division’. However, I will try to showcase certain monetization techniques that I perform and companies and programs that I use and will promote and give examples of how I am doing with that.

    My goal hopefully is to also get some new affiliate earnings by recommending you to new programs! Although, that may not be my agenda all the time

    4) BLOGGING ANSWERS AND SOLUTIONS – I’ve got over 40 active sites, and that used to be over 70 sites. I am familiar with blogs and blogging and have been doing this since May 2005. There are things I do and know that, in general, others do not know how to do. There are ways that I do things that are much simpler or faster than what others do – or pay others to do – and, perhaps by me documenting this .. you will learn a thing or two, or pass along the information to another. That is the nice thing about the internet. Not everything needs to be monetized. I like to help, and as long as you don’t copy the content of my blog word for word or aggregate it automatically in your blog .. FEEL FREE to pass along any of the tips that I provide for your own use. If you give me a ‘hats off’ link that would be great 🙂 If you want to donate money to my paypal account, that would be fine too 😀

    My goal is to build this blog into the operating maintenance blog for my entire network, and show people what it’s like to be running a multitude of blogs and websites, and trying to jump from that “hobby business” stage into a full-time and financial supporting business venture.

    Thanks for dropping by! Hope to see you soon.

    Feel free to sign up to receive daily email updates on future posts of this blog!

    Tags: , , ,
  • scissors
    July 2nd, 2009HARTreorganization

    I am currently in the process of rearranging the categories as there are just too many of them!

    When I first started this blog, the idea was that each post related to a specific blog will a separate category. But, now that I look over them content – I don’t think it is worth it anymore. After having about 70 active blogs and categories, if I wasn’t talking about a specific blog I seemed to have post the entry in the “Woohoo” and “Hmmm Things” categories.

    Today’s Task

    * Today I will be coming up with NEW categories and shuffle and try to make things more manageable and take a look at my archives.

    Tags: ,
  • scissors
    March 2nd, 2009HARTreorganization

    Backgrounder – The Battling Series of Blogs

    Back in January 2006 .. I first created a “Battling” series of blogs, each with unique names such as .. Battling-Cancer.com .. Battling-Obesity.com .. etc. In September 2007, sparked by the enormous recurring domain registration renewals, I created a brand new umbrella domain, and transfered these unique domain blogs to newly created subdomain blogs. I did document my experience into two semi-related posts that may interest you … here and there.

    So, after my “reorganization #1” the blogs, the new “Battling Series” of blogs looked like this .. cancer.BattlingForHealth.com .. and obesity.BattlingForHealth.com. Today, March 1, 2009, is my “reorganization #2” where I combined those 14 subdomain blogs back into the root domain – Battling For Health.

    Here are the 12 steps that I have done during the past 10 days to complete this project. I hope it offers help and insights to future readers who may decide to undertake a similar project.

    Step 1: Decide Your Objection And Make A Plan Of Action

    I’ve decided that for BOTH BattlingForHealth.com and AndYouWill.com series of blogs, I will move all the individual subdomain blogs into one mega blog for each niche. In 2009 I want to try to leverage the strength of these two larger and populated domain blogs and build toward a greater success and expansion of my HART-Empire Network. I don’t think I could do this keeping the status quo with 28 smaller and not fully populated subdomain blogs. One on hand – it’s true … there really is a benefit of having many sites because it’s easier to make $40 a month on 50 blogs than it is to make $2,000 on 1 blog. I’ve proven that.

    But there comes a point after the development that you begin to see opportunities and the possibility of moving away from that $50 per month to $2,000 per month. It takes leverage and momentum. I really think that our “Battling Series” of blogs is gaining momentum and having all the topics in one major blog can provide leverage in its growth. For instance, rather than having 14 writers each covering 14 different topics .. I hope to have between 5-7 writers covering all 14 topics. There won’t be a just few popular blogs in the group posting at once a day and a few dead blogs not posting at all .. there will now be one blog with multiple postings on multiple topics per day. Content is good .. and I think more content is better. Having better content on a variety of health topics is one of my supplementary objectives for future growth and sustainability.

    So my objective was to combine all the health blogs into one “Battling For Health” blog on March 1, 2009 .. and then combine all the do-it-yourself and self-improvement blogs into one combined “And You Will” blog by April 1, 2009. I still consider this in line with my original vision of my HART-Empire Network but just with a different means to the way.

    Step 2: Do A Feasibility Test And Review Your Objective

    I really liked our current network wide template and considered modifying it for these future mega blogs, but this template is lacking widgets. It got me to think that I should either find a template with widgets, or make these widgetable with dynamic sidebars. Since I’m an accountant – I decided to find a new template!

    I selected the Lifestyle Theme by Brian Gardner and just provided you with the affiliate link. Technically, although these “Revolution Two” themes (now Studiopress) are free … it’s definitely worth it and would recommend you purchase the support package. Everything you need is in the forum to help make your template a success, and a great bunch of contributor moderators who help answer any questions you may have. I purchased the single theme package, because at this time I did not think I will need other themes. Although I am building a new template, I still want some similarity among some of my sites visually.

    I immediately started to practice with the template, importing sample data, playing with the templates, reading the forum .. and see what can be done with these templates. Because of my impulsive behavior, I actually destroyed my data twice before rebuilding a third time to what it is today at BattlingForHealth.com.

    For the first time, prior to the conversion, I was using the FeedWordpress plugin to aggregage all the posts from the individual blogs into this one main ‘Portal’ blog (as I called it). I didn’t do anything with all of those imported posts, which were linking back directly to the old blogs. So, when I imported the sample database .. I know had two files of same title but, the “real” content had a “dash-2” (url/content-2/) in the URL!

    I destroyed the second time, after seeing the raw data of 14 blogs combined into 1 blog and give me ideas to test it in action, so I can make modifications to the template to make reader navigation better or provide more goodies that I would like to have in a blog. Also, my intention was to recreate this blog with the content as close to the cutoff date as possible, so I don’t leave behind straggling comments and posts in the older blogs.

    Step 3: First Backup And Then Export As Much Information As Possible

    My first objective – to be safer than sorry – was to make a complete backup of every blog’s MySQL database and all of the files on the server. If anything would go wrong, I could always delete everything and restore the files and put back the database and nobody would know the difference.

    Next, I upgraded all of the blogs to the latest version that the new blog is on – being wordpress version 2.7.1. I wanted to be sure that I was exporting the right data with the right format and information that it would be needing to import into the new blog.

    Finally .. I used the built-in export feature of wordpress to export the information:

    . from Dashboard
    .. Tools
    … Export
    …. Restrict Author (I left it as “All Authors”)
    ….. Click “Download Export File”
    …… SAVE AS FILE on computer, and added the blogname before the default .. so it looked like.. battling-cancer-wordpress-yyyy-mm-dd.xml format

    That was pretty much it on this task.

    Step 4: Import As Much Information As You Can

    To import your .xml file it’s pretty easy. WordPress imports all of the posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags from your .xml export file.

    . from Dashboard
    .. Tools
    … Import (WordPress)

    There were a few things that I discovered during the first two “draft” creations of this merger process. Firstly, although you can edit the usernames … DON’T. When I first started, my username was created as it was publicly known .. HART (1-800-HART) except a derivative of that without the brackets, so my username had become …
    HART 1-800-HART

    When I switched to just HART .. all the author tags throughout the template and database just did not work. I ended up just leaving it as is. Because I was under various names throughout the 14 blogs with identical or similar usernames, I did route all posts by my author to an existing author I created on the first import – and continued with that. I don’t need 14 different usernames for me!

    WordPress 2.7.1 import worked great for me. When it asks you if you want to import all the attachments – SAY YES! Back in the early versions, I would have had to copy all the image files from the old domain/subdomain into the same locations of the new domain.

    WordPress 2.7 did not import the blogrolls however with all of the other data. There are currently two ways to import the blogrolls of each file. The first is easy … just go visit the following URL … [yourdomain.com]/wp-links-opml.php and then SAVE AS or SAVE PAGE AS some file like, blogroll.battlingcancerblog.xml. You can then import these links via the TOOLS / IMPORT / BLOGROLL function directly in wordpress.

    I tried that the first time before I deleted the database and didn’t like it. Some of the 14 blogs were organized very differently from the others. Some had link categories like “Canada, United States, United Kingdom”; others had link categories like “Sites, Blogs, Associations”; and some blogs were quite descriptive and well categorized. I chose to just put two firefox window browsers stretched so they fit side by side and CTRL-C / CTRL-V (copy/paste) all the blogrolls from the 14 blogs in categories that mimicked the wordpress blog categories.

    Step 5: Massage The Imported Data To Suit Your Objectives

    This was a challenge during the first run. Each blog has a gabillion categories and a gajillion wordpress tags, and when put together it just did not make sense. I chose to go publicly with 15 new categories .. one for each of the blog categories of the old “Battling” series of blogs (addiction, depression, diabetes, etc) plus one for announcements. There are a few more categories, but they are private ones, out of view and not ON the template, but USED by the template. For instance, the featured category for the image show.

    There is an option at the bottom of the category dashboard in wordpress, that allows you to convert your categories to tags. I can see some ways that might benefit some blogs, but it didn’t benefit me. I chose NOT to do that. Instead, I went straight into my wordpress SETTINGS / WRITING options, and individually set the default post category to that I was working on. For instance, I created the categories .. and imported all of the battling obesity information and categories. I want all the obesity posts to have one single category – the “OBESITY” category. So, I went into my option and set this option as my default category. I then went into the POSTS / CATEGORIES menu and bulk deleted all categories that were NOT my 15 core categories. Even today, I have decided to leave them in Capital Letters so it was easier to read. When you delete a category in wordpress, you do not delete the post .. the category just automatically defaults to the default category you select in the settings. It probably took me about 5 minutes for each blog to do this task.

    Step 6: Massage The MySQL Database To Compensate Changed URLs

    I have a policy that I like to link to at least one post in my archives or in another HART-Empire Network blog .. in every post in every blog! This way, google alerts will notify me everytime it is seen out in the blogosphere, and cheaper than hiring a copyright watcher service or using copyscape all of the time. When you import transactions into the wordpress originally created from another domain, I’m not really sure if wordpress automatically renames the new URL according to the blog setup and permalinks. I am 100% sure that it does not rename any URL’s manually entered in each post to accomplish the linking to the archives and other blogs.

    Because I do this on all blogs, I decided to do this LAST – instead of one at a time after each import … so I can change all instances throughout the new blog’s MySQL database at once.

    Here’s how to do this:

    * Go into your cPanel of your new blog, and run phpMyAdmin.
    * Select your new MySQL database
    * On the left side you should see all of the tables, and the right side other stuff
    * On the left side click the wp_posts table (or ???_posts) depending what you called ???_ in your wp-config.php file ..
    * On the right side click the top menu “SQL”
    * In the white box – replace what is there with the following (example what I did)

    UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (
    guid,
    ‘http://obesity.battlingforhealth.com’,
    ‘http://battlingforhealth.com’);

    * I repeated for all domains .. (replacing obesity subdomain with addiction, cancer, and other subdomains). This changes the reference of links and drops the subdomain in the URL in all posts.
    * Then again, in the white box – replace with the following

    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
    post_content,
    ‘http://cancer.battlingforhealth.com’,
    ‘http://battlingforhealth.com’);

    * Repeat for all domains as above.

    If you are unfamiliar with MySQL database and think this is wrong (you should always question before following instructions from the internet) .. look at the tables inside the wp_post table using the top menu BROWSE and you’ll see.

    Step 7: Manually Add Stuff That Cannot Be Automatically Imported

    I probably could have put the blogroll information in this section, because this is the time during my reorganization that I actually added all of the blogroll links to the new Battling For Health blog.

    But, in addition to the blogroll .. I had a lot of stuff to consider and take care of – because my old templates were not widgetable. Code for each of the blogs were in the footers for sitemeter statistics, whos amung us links, google analytics, feedburner feedsmith settings, all-in-one-seo settings and options, blog catalog and other directory maintenance requirements, and even google adsense and other monetization.

    I have tried to keep the code “off the template” and strictly using widgets now, because I hope to replicate this template into the AndYouWill.com site next month. I have made many template modifications, but nothing will affect the code in the other blog… that was a challenge for me 🙂

    Step 8: Manually Massage Stuff Resulting From The Consolidation Process

    This means “clean-up” time .. and I’m still cleaning up! Each of my 14 blogs had its own About page, its own Subscription page with its own feedburner and RSS feeds, it’s own top post links, contact pages, and more! They were always named the same too, like …/contact/ ..contact-2/ ..contact-3/ etc ..

    I hard coded “staple” pages that I want in the top navigation area, but in the sidebar I have left a widget showing all the existing pages at the current time. This is a work in progress. Besides fixing and massaging the old pages, we will be adding new pages to the lot!

    Step 9: Stop Existing Cron Jobs On The Old Blogs

    In all of the old blogs, I had the WP-DB-BACKUP activated, and was performing an automated backup every day on every blog that would create a backup of the MySQL database and then email it to one of my Gmail accounts. If the file was too big, it just copied it to the server in a ../wp-content/backup-####/ folder. Well, backups on redundant databases that never change only uses up CPU resources and space, and I had to be sure that these “cron jobs” were stopped. This also goes for any feedwordpress or wp-o-matic plugins (if you are using them to retrieve RSS from other sites).

    Once deactivated, each blog was now finished in my mind – and no more posts or any activity should be happening.

    Step 10: Tell Everybody That You Moved!

    Well .. because I was combining 14 blogs into one, I chose to post my “We are moving” post after I exported the database. I didn’t want readers to see 14 instances of the same request to change your bookmarks and RSS feed. I left this up for 1 day before I did the redirect.

    I might have tweeted this a few times after I moved and tell my friends. 🙂

    Step 11: Setup Redirects And Modify The .htaccess File

    This works so people don’t have to change their bookmarks (although I hope they do) and gives a 301 redirect on all the posts. Eventually, the search engines will recognize the new site as the original (*knock on wood* eh?). Honestly .. I don’t know how the mechanics work – but, I know what works for me.

    What I did was rename the existing .htaccess file into something else … and copied a new file over that looked like this (e.g. for addiction blog)

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteBase /

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^addiction.battlingforhealth.com\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ battlingforhealth.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.addiction.battlingforhealth.com\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ battlingforhealth.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Then, I would go into the options of the old blog, run permalinks, then hit the top “Visit Site” link to be sure that I was being redirected.

    Feel free to test this out! Actually ….
    http://Battling-Addiction.com >> redirects to >> http://addiction.BattlingForHealth.com >> redirects to BattlingForHealth.com !

    Step 12: Step Away From All Of This And Stop Tweaking For Now

    I think it’s perfect one moment, and then I see terrible destructive features the next! That’s the life of a webmaster and blog owner! I thought I left a lot on the table, and there is still much to do. I did want to finish the basic navigation and USAGE stuff and get that working to make an easy transition. But, I’m not going to change my site around because on of the first people suggest that one type of text might be too close to the side border etc. I will listen to everybody’s advice, and then (like Captain Kirk) choose the action which seems to be the most important to follow. Or, I may do nothing.

    I like to tweak because all my sites are dynamic – not static – and always changing .. with new plugins, new content, new links, etc. There will never be a point in time where “it’s all done” because I will always be tweaking. It’s like looking at your statistics. There’s always more statistics. You can go crazy watching statistic and tweaking your blog when instead, you should just be letting the readers create statistics and reading your blog!

    I decided that I wouldn’t look (much) on opening day March 1, 2009 .. although around 10pm I wish I had. It seems that posts without tags in the new wordpress 2.7 seem to break my template and create an error on the single page. I have fixed those posts, and will watch for this in the future.

    The End.

    Disclaimer: This is how I did it for my blogs .. I take no responsibility for what happens with your blogs – however, I hope this little recap and tutorial has helped give you ideas. It is more to document my process for when I do my “AndYouWill” blogs, and future reorganizations – if any 😀

    ? or .. The Beginning
    (of BattlingForHealth.com)

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