The Chronicle of a Domain Name Change to a Blog

192048 Resource 76407 24 21 1197297275476 1201453662099 Controlled Managing Your Blog Infrastructure -- Is this a wise use of your time?

When it comes to domain name management, there are many ways to do it wrong, and only a few (perhaps one) way to do it right. For this reason alone, there's is no question that business people who blog, should outsource this problem.

The general premise of an <a title="Free eBook: 7 Simple Steps to More Effective Business Blogging" href="item/191394">eBook</a> I recently published concerns the amount of time you spend blogging. It's my view that things that are contextual to your business (i.e., not core to your business), should be outsourced. This allows you focus on the activities that march you toward your business objectives instead of being defocused. Stated simply - if you're a "professional blogger" become a better blogger; if you're an insurance adviser, do that job better and realize that while sharing snippets of your domain expertise in a blog will help you achieve certain marketing objectives, becoming a professional blogger (or domain name management expert) is not likely to create success or additional revenues in your chosen profession.Your time is extremely valuable, especially if you're in a professional services industry like real estate. When I encountered <a title="The Chronicle of a Domain Name Change to a Blog" href="http://www.realestatebloglab.com/real-estate-blogging/the-chronicle-of-a-domain-name-change-to-a-blog/" target="_blank">this blog post</a> about <a href="http://www.realestatebloglab.com/real-estate-blogging/the-chronicle-of-a-domain-name-change-to-a-blog/#comments">changing a domain name</a> for a Wordpress weblog, I was amazed not at the complexity of the process, but totally surprised that so many real estate professionals are trying to understand it.It's great to find detailed technical documentation about issues such as <a href="http://www.realestatebloglab.com/real-estate-blogging/the-chronicle-of-a-domain-name-change-to-a-blog/#comments">this</a>; I applaud the folks at <a href="http://www.realestatebloglab.com/">Real Estate Blog Lab</a> for offering up this amazing series of technical steps to help their constituents and visitors. As I read the blow-by-blow account of the challenges faced when changing a Wordpress domain name, I couldn't stop laughing - after all, I'm fairly technical and even I was overwhelmed by the complexity and the numerous things that must be carefully considered when changing a domain name. I realized that when it comes to domains, there are many ways to do it wrong, and only a few (perhaps one) way to do it right. For this reason alone, there's is no question that business people who blog, should outsource this problem.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">If your job is to sell real estate (or fill-in-the-blank) and you are deeply concerned about learning how to deal with issues like this, you are seriously distracted.</blockquote>Recently we had a customer (<a title="Snow Home" href="http://news.snowhome.com/" target="_blank">Snowhome</a>) change its blogsite domain name, and while it was a frightening idea for the customer, this was the task list for the customer:<ol><li>Call MyST Support, advise them of the new domain name (2 minutes).</li><li>Follow the MyST Support instructions for changing the CName (5 minutes).</li><li>Change the link on the website to point to the new blogsite domain (5 minutes).</li></ol>This is what it's like to outsource the details. 9 application/xml false blog infrastructure domain name change outsource outsourcing Wordpress The Chronicle of a Domain Name Change to a Blog Steve Belt has a running chronicle of what he went through while changing the ULR Domain Name for his blog. If you are thinking about making this kind of change you should read Steve's post on what you will probably encounter in the process. http://www.realestatebloglab.com/real-estate-blogging/the-chronicle-of-a-domain-name-change-to-a-blog/#comments I was amazed not at the complexity of the process, but surprised that so many real estate professionals are trying to understand it. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 192154 Resource 174050 173239 21 1197399361795 1201453822390 Controlled Can you really do it all?

Bill, On the face of your ascertion, I agree that for the majority of professionals, this should be something they can outsource. Unfortunately for me, prior to my real estate career I was a software developer, so poking my nose into this type of thing is a common pitfall. I'm likely to think that I can do it better/faster/cheaper...whether that's indeed true or not. As you can see from the comments at the Lab, I'm not the only one. If someone has a self-hosted Wordpress blog, running on their own Linux server, regardless of industry, then whether they should be outsourcing it or not, they have too much geek in them to do otherwise.However, as it relates to blogging and social networking, I disagree that your company can do everything I did, and more importantly everything that needs to be done. To be fair, a partnership could certainly have been employed. I've provided one extreme (do everything yourself). You've provided another extreme (you do everything). I'm somewhat in disbelief you would have done everything I did.I believe you could definitely do the easy part. Change the DNS registration, setting up the apache config, and performing the admin function in Wordpress to change the URL could easily be outsourced, though the time spent on that activity was minimal. Is/was your company aware that the Wordpress admin function doesn't rewrite old URLs within the blog? Hopefully you do now, and adding that to your scripts and making sure that gets done would definitely be value-added. For someone not familiar with MySQL, that task alone justifies the outsourcing of this effort.But what I don't see your company doing, is going to all of the various social networking sites (and quite probably google & yahoo) to re-register the blog. That component of the task is at least as important as the other items, and having this list of stops to make, along with which social networking players play nicer than others is quite valuable. 10 application/xml false blog infrastructure domain name change outsource outsourcing Wordpress xlint:ignore-summary Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 192691 Resource 174050 24 21 1197939468921 1201453515275 Controlled Can you really do it all?

This is an excellent question... and the short answer is no, not for free.

Steve:Excellent comment, and I loved this line -<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"...whether they should be outsourcing it or not, they have too much geek in them to do otherwise."</blockquote>I'm familiar with this issue because I'm a geek and I think you know that I'm totally comfortable with geeks doing geeky things because they're not in our taget audience. But on to your more serious comments...<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"As you can see from the comments at the Lab, I'm not the only one."</blockquote>Yes, and it is the widespread interest in doing it themselves that was what I found so unexpected. I can totally relate to someone of your background doing this.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"Is/was your company aware that the Wordpress admin function doesn't rewrite old URLs within the blog?"</blockquote>Yes.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"Hopefully you do now, and adding that to your scripts and making sure that gets done would definitely be value-added."</blockquote>Yes, we do, and we go even further. When a company converts from say a Wordpress blog to Blogsite we also transform all historical content to the new domain (if indeed that's the case), and/or to the new URI's. Most blog tools (as you know) do not truly embrace the idea of unique URI's; MyST Blogsite does, and in the process of integrating legacy posts, we provide each with a bona-fide GUID and corresponding URI that becomes the authoritative home for the object. We also handle the creation of permanent redirects from the legacy URL's for all posts to the new home for each object.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"I don't see your company doing, is going to all of the various social networking sites (and quite probably google & yahoo) to re-register the blog."</blockquote>Correct, we don't manage all the social site changes because it's generally impractical to do so (security and credentials being the biggest show stopper). However, some business people do want this task outsourced. With regard to search engines - yes, we manage all of that for new and existing clients that are changing domains, brands, names, etc. We even re-register all feeds across 80 RSS search engines, and of course, the new feeds contain all the new URL's. 10 application/xml false blog infrastructure domain name change outsource outsourcing Wordpress Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 76407 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web