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Comment by sendos | Hacker News Reader

In addition, there is the problem that links from other websites to your blog will stop working, and your Google search rankings will be affected.

I have a custom domain name for my Posterous blog, so links to the main site will not break, but links to individual posts will break if the new blogging platform doesn't follow the same link naming convention as Posterous (which most likely they don't)

Do you guys have any ideas/tricks how I can avoid issues like the above, and how to make sure that certain posts which currently rank high in Google search results keep their rank, if possible?

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You can create a set of 301 redirects to make sure traffic that is sent directly to a given post finds the correct page. It will also let search engines re-index your content at the new address.

You can do this by dumping the relative paths of your previous blog posts and current ones into your .htaccess file. This won't get all of the old links (category/tag links, for instance) but at least direct links to a specific post will end up in the right place.

I guess the only way to accomplish that is to set up the new blog on my own server where I will have access to a .htaccess file. That is, I can't use any hosted blog like blogger, tumblr, wordress.com. Is this correct, or are there any hosted blog services that will give you this fine-grained control? Or are there any things I can do on the domain registrar side?

Alternatively, is it a good or bad idea to route all traffic to my blog through a VPS I have, so that all the old blog post addresses go to the right place on one of the hosted blog services? (I'm just trying to avoid hosting my own blog, since I assume there are a lot of headaches involved)

Why do you think that having your own Wordpress stand-alone blog is such a problem?

I decided a while ago to move my personal site from Posterous to GitHub pages [1]. It's been a little tricky to set up but only because I'm fussy and haven't messed with css before. Still not finished since I can't find a sensible way to extract my content from Posterous (that dosen't involve the API).

With GitHub pages, you don't need to worry about the hosting aspect and you'll always have a copy of your site locally. Pretty sure you can deal with the .htaccess file stuff too.

If you decide to look into this, check out Jekyll-bootstrap too [2].

[1] http://pages.github.com/

[2] http://jekyllbootstrap.com/

why not use the API?

I moved mine from Tumblr to GitHub recently and used a migration script to grab all the posts and turn them into Markdown files. There's a script that works with Posterous too: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/blog-migrations

Yup, I already tried that script and I believe it's out of date. Open pull request at https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/pull/477

edit: I've just realised I don't need the code to be merged into jekyll in order to use it (facepalm).

edit2: ok, maybe not as straightforward as I thought. I'm not really a coder so it takes me longer to understand what scripts are doing (and then tweak them so they work for me).

If you don't have access to the .htaccess file you can use WP plugins to set up 301s, e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/

Routing all blog traffic through your VPS is a bad idea, IMHO. Your VPS becomes a single point of failure for your blog - if it stops working all of your posts are unavailable, not just the ones that require 301s.

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