archGFX » domains

Changing Hosts the hard way

adam — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 03:14:09 +0000

In case you're wondering where this blog dissappeared to today (and i knowyou weren't), I finally got tired enough of dealing with PHP 4/IIS/the lack of REQUEST_URI that i changed hosts. Thusly, the CNAME record for this blog dissappeared for a few hours.

The main reason i switched was that i wanted was to be able to move wordpress into the top level directory, from /blog/. so i figured i'd try and do it all in one fell swoop. what's more fun than trying to do something "mission critical" in a language you've just learned? so here's what i added to my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch 301 /blog/index.php/(.*) /blog/$1 RedirectMatch 301 /blog/wp-content/(.*) /wp-content/$1

the first line is for old URL's. the second line is for anything i uploaded and referenced in a post (especially images). so far both seem to be working. (i found the RedirectMatch example on this page). And, since you're reading this, the CNAME record seems to have been set up, although i had to file a support ticket for that.

UPDATE: i forgot that i'd also added a prefix to my permalink structure (/blog/) so my redirects were all failing. should be fixed now (code updated)

More Blue!

adam — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:46:13 +0000

apparently, domains are cheaper than candy. or owen's got an in. or despite the absurdity of it all, he's actually serious. given that the real announcement is that his wordpress importer for habari seems to have worked.

Domain Mapping and SEO

adam — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:51:59 +0000

I domain mapped this blog to a subdomain of archGFX earlier this month, based on the idea that it would be beneficial to the visibility of my main site. I'm not sure how successful that's been, since i'm not really sure how all this works.

Google

google seems to be aware that sbk.wp.com = sbk.archgfx.net.

Except that external pagerank checkers don't see things that way. sbk.archgfx.net gets 0 from blogflux' pagerank checker, while sbk.wp.com still holds down a 6.
Also, as far as their blogsearch is concerned, sbk.wp.com is doing far better than sbk.archgfx.net, with no overlap in links.

Yahoo!

After changing my yahoo! site explorer account to check archgfx.net rather than www.archgfx.net, my inlinks doubled. That's because they're counting inlinks to sbk.wp.com as well, so they get the prize for handling the domain mapping the best.

Technorati

it pains me to even mention technorati. People who use technorati as any sort of metric, seem to also think that 10 is a valid sample size. Nonetheless, a technorati rank is some sort of badge of how cool you are. technorati falls prey to the same trap as google's blogsearch, maintaining separate rankings for both addresses. having only looked at google and yahoo's webmaster tools, i wasn't aware that i hadn't maintained my ranking, until i read //engtech's rundown on trying to get technorati to fix their rankings. Technorati still removes anyone who gets their ranking by distributing blog software that links back to their site. That sort of lack of skill (google's blogsearch is perfectly capable of removing backlinks to archgfx that come from disconnected) coupled with a lack of value for those who give back to the community really makes it hard to trust them.