A Place For Stephen

One of my resolutions for the new 2008 year is to update my old sites to take advantage of the WordPress platform.

Well, it’s the first of January, 2008, and I can tick off one of those already! Rockin!

“The Internet Cynic” is a site that I developed over 12 months ago - yeah - way back at the end of ‘06… and it was done as an outlet for me to vent some frustration at the time.

I’ve really done SFA with it since then… and it’s a shame ‘cos it’s a good concept that could do really well with web 2.0. But since I didn’t even KNOW about web 2.0 and Wordpress back then… well it had to wait until the time was right.

Well, it is now… and in ‘08, please welcome the revamped and re-launched “The Internet Cynic”.

But the point of this post is not to simply send you there, but to outline what was involved in the transformation.

What WAS Involved?

• So first up.. install WordPress on the domain using Fantastico from my cPanel - an easy process.
  
• Next… upload my new theme Blu 2c from Shinra House - and no… I can’t speak Italian, so I used Babelfish to do a translation of the site so I could work out what was what!
  
• Upload the theme to my WP-CONTENT/THEMES folder, and then activated it.
  
• The only plugin used (so far) is Akismet… so I activated that too, and adjusted my custom permalink structure to %postname% only.
  
• Made a few simple changes to the theme - header, footer and sidebar files - which were easy to do thanks to the developer!
  
• Grabbed the existing content from the old site, and created a heap (well 10…) of new posts based on that content.
  
• Tweaked the theme again as the new stuff went in and I could see what needed work.

Oh… there were TWO important changes I had to make that I haven’t told you about yet…

Don’t Lose Your Search Engine Links

Because it’s an existing domain, AND is getting some traffic (25 unique visits a month LOL) I didn’t want to lose that!

So I made a few changes to the .htaccess file to tell the search engines I’d permanently moved some pages…

It’s easy with a 301 redirect.

The format is
redirect 301 /pathto/oldfilename.html http://domain.com/new/
so I did that for all the existing pages… pointing them to their new WP equivalents…
e.g.
redirect 301 /unload http://theinternetcynic.com/get-a-load-off/
and Bob’s your Uncle!

Random Pics

I originally had a selection of random “cynical” images displayed on the old HTML page, using a random pic SSI generator cgi program. Now since I don’t yet know how to do that with php - yeah I know it’s easy, I just haven’t got a round tuit yet - then I needed to include an .shtml page in my sidebar to call the SSI (server-side-includes) program to generate the pics.

How? It’s easy when you put a link the the shtml page within an i-frame, and put that in your sidebar Mix php and html includes? Not impossible!

So that’s about all I needed to do.

Updated an old site to a completely new look and all set for web 2.0 in under about 5 hours.

Now all I have to do is go over to technorati, and mybloglog, and … … …

Happy New Year to you all!

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