The Associate Reference

Written on June 22, 2008 – 9:16 am | 608 views | Posted in Main by admin (Who am I?)

For a long time, I have been wanting to give a face lift to my The Associate Reference blog. But, as usual, I was giving some excuse and postponing the task.

Finally, I was forced to act as my current web host has decided to close down their hosting operations as they want to concentrate on Web 2.0 training which is their core competence. Yes, I am talking about Authority Site Center. They have given us time till 31-Jul-2008 to shift all our websites to another web hosting company.

After lot of consultations and discussions with various web publishing friends, I decided to go with HostGator. I had already hosted one of my sites there and I was quite happy with them.

I had planned on the following tasks along with the shifting of my blog:

1. Shift the blog from ASC to HostGator.
2. Wordpress upgrade from version 2.3.3 to version 2.5.1
3. Change the wordpress theme as I had got bored with the Cutline even though they are the most popular. I finally settled on the BlogOhBlog theme by Bob.
4. Improve the look, feel and appeal of my blog for the visitors.

BlogOhBlog has some very cool and highly professional premium themes. I was tempted to use one of those themes. But, then I figured this should be a separate project and decided to postpone it by around six months.

Also as a cost cutting measure, I decided to perform the entire task myself and not engage a tech guy.

OK, what was the result of this exercise?

1. I have successfully shifted the blog from ASC to HostGator.
2. Carried out wordpress upgrade from version 2.3.3 to version 2.5.1
3. Changed the wordpress theme to BlogOhBlog.
4. Hopefully improved the look, feel and appeal of my blog for the visitors.

But, there were certain problems while carrying out these tasks. There were some compatibility issues while importing SQL tables to the new host. It was not because of HostGator but because of MySQL version compatibility issues. Because of which, I could not do an upgrade but I had to do a fresh wordpress installation at the new host and then import the posts, pages and categories using wordpress import feature.

This did not pose any major problems. But, since I did not have any tagging feature enabled earlier, none of the tags have got populated. So, I have to manually create these tags which is going to be a time consuming task.

But, I have released my blog from the maintenance mode as any further tweaking need not keep my blog locked.

I would really appreciate if you could take a few minutes to comment about my new look blog. Any comment including constructive criticism is most welcome. At the same time, any suggestions for improvement are also welcome.

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