Back online, and more work to do

Well everything is back online. It was quite a lot of work, but I’m quite satisfied with the results. Well, I still have work to do, as I have to apologize to the (minority) of Internet Explorer users among the readers, as the layout goes haywire there. I think it has to do with the way margins and padding are handled by different browsers, but I have to dig into it. Luckily most of my visitors use Firefox (over 75% actually).

Short recap
I won’t bore you too much with writing about all the work I did, but here’s a little recap:

• I expected Feedburner to be an easy transition, but it wasn’t. Somehow they didn’t recognize my subdomain as a valid address. A slightly different notation made all the difference, and my feed is running again.
• Updating the DNS settings was easy. My host Argeweb, offers a nice interface to do this, and it worked like a charm. Now only to wait for all the DNS-servers to update and all the cache to clear around the world so everybody will get the new site.
• Permalink fixing was not that bad. There where different options to solve this issue, but I chose to make the new permalinks for existing posts, identical to the one they had on typepad. No hassle with redirects, and the .htaccess file. I did have to dig into the MySQL database, but this post at Slacker Manager provided a great description of how to take care of it. Only some minor manual changes had to be done after that part.
• Most of the work was in getting the layout of the posts right. Exporting from Typepad was easy, importing in Wordpress as well, only the layout got messed up in some posts. While at it, I fixed the links to the images, and cleaned up a lot of html code (note to self: Never use copy-paste text from Word or Google Docs again…ever!).

Stuff to be done
In short a list of things I still want to do, mainly technical:

• Fix layout for Internet Explorer
• Check layout in Opera and Safari
• Put my About page online
• Checking the wfw:comments tag in my feed so Feedflare can display a count
• Change the picture above (this is the picture from the original YGo Loner theme)

Final thoughts
So this is the first post I created in Wordpress in its entirety. Up until now I like it! Don’t get me wrong, I liked Typepad as well. I think they offer a great service, that made it very easy for me to start a blog and post content. I ended up using it for only 3 months. In these months my enthusiasm for blogging and for the technology behind it grew, and Typepad was too limiting or too expensive to give me the same options as Wordpress is giving me. But it was great to start with.

Preparing and changing the blog was great, but I’m glad that from here on I can spend more time creating content.

PS: If you experience any glitches, please leave me a comment or mail me at lodewijkvdb (at) lodewijkvdb (dot) com. Screenshots are welcome and please specify your browser. Thanks!