June 18th, 2009 by On the 8th anniversary to the day of Shufflingdead.com (okay, it was technically the morning of the following day, but give me this) I finally finished porting everything over to WordPress.
Note that the links on the left to the forums and the old site are gone. The old site is gone, so there’s nothing left to link to, and the link to the forums is now on the right, where all of the other community and networking links are.
The effort required to bring over Blogs, Cock Wars, Comics, and Things of the Week was minimal compared to porting over Articles. I had to sift through hundreds of text files and associated images, refer to a database I was kind enough to myself to make to keep track of all the old updates, update code, and copy and paste so much damn stuff that I can’t help but marvel.
My main problem was determining how to reorganize the categories into a fewer number of more logical categories. Some of them were based on the topic of the articles, and some on the type of article. I was especially worried that if I started changing everything around, that I’d lose incoming links and Google page rank. Then, just Tuesday night, I discovered that I can change URLs as much as I want, and WordPress will redirect people using the old links to the correct pages! I had a pretty merry stroll around the room when I found that out. I’ve decided that articles will be organized according to their topic, although I haven’t quite finished sorting those out yet, so some stuff is still getting moved around. The point is that it’s up now.
Well, almost everything is up. I decided to delete the most embarrassing of the embarrassing. Not surprisingly, there’s still plenty up to be embarrassed about, and even when the text itself isn’t embarrassing, a lot of the images are weirdly sized and positioned. The URLs are also not remotely optimized for search engines. I’ve finished fixing the site as much as I had planned to, but fixing it has caused me to find more stuff to fix.
Now, onto the continuing development of the new and thrilling Shufflingdead.com:
Phase 1: Finish porting site over to WordPress
Phase 2: Update at least minimally
Phase 3: Promote site
Phase 4: Expand the Shufflingdead empire
Phase 5 and beyond: still unknown
Phase 1 is done! Phase 2 is going well and continues (although my eventual goal is to get the site updated twice a day)! Now it’s time to smash into Phase 3! I’m still considering how I might do this.
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