Lee's Weblog

After trying to maintain two blogs and realizing that barely have the time for ONE blog I’ve decided to merge DaLeeMan.com into LeesWeblog.com. I tried  a bunch of blog applications that help you manage multiples, but then I realized something pretty important…both of my blogs are the same… a mix of business and geek. So NOW i need to figure out how to not only redirect my pages but to copy comments, redirect users, and make Google happy… This is actually much easier than I had planned…

Merging two blogs

WordPress makes this easy. While I could go through each of the posts, duplicate them, add comments and so on that’s far more time consuming than I want to worry about! Luckily I just had to go to WP-Admin->Tools->Export on the old blog and export all my data. This saves an XML file to your local computer. Then, go to the new blog and import the XML file from the old blog at WP-Admin->Tools->Import. It was that easy. I’ve used this method in the past for a complete restore, but never for a merge. Seemed to work very well.

Redirecting users

I don’t want users to continue to go to my old blog, but I also know that some users have bookmarked a few of my pages. I installed a module called Redirection on the old site and set each page to redirect to the new site. The redirects MUST be 301′s (Permanently Moved) otherwise search engines like Google will choke.

Google Webmaster Tools

If you use Google’s Webmaster Tools (which you should), you’ll want to go to (within Webmaster Tools)  Site Configuration->Change of Address   and move the old site to the new one. While you’re there, go ahead and resubmit a new sitemap!

Cleaning up the mess

Unfortunately, once all this is done, you may have duplicate “Categories”, post, etc…that’s the fine tuning you’ll do to complete the madness. All said and done, this was much much easier than I had planned, which is good because I don’t have time to manage two blogs, nonetheless spend a ton of time merging those blogs!