Announcements

Changes Made and Changes Coming to The California Blog of Appeal

June 1, 2007

I’m in the process of setting up my own web host for The California Blog of Appeal. Right now, the blog is hosted on WordPress.com. at the URL http://calblogofappeal.wordpress.com.

Those of you who have found the blog through a link from another site already know this. But those of you accessing the blog through the URL http://www.calblogofappeal.com may not. I have domain forwarding set up on the calblogofappeal.com domain name and, until tonight, also had domain masking enabled. That means that if you typed in the URl http://www.calblogofappeal.com, you were forwarded to the WordPress URL but it was hidden from you.

The chief drawback to this domain forwarding and masking scheme is that if you then click on a specific post title or the link to its comments, the URL in your address bar still says calblogofappeal.com, which means you can’t identify the specific URL of the post for trackbacks or linking. Tonight, I disabled the masking, so as soon as you reach the site, you’ll see the wordpress URL in the address bar.

When I move the blog to my host, the actual address of the bog will be calblogofappeal.com. If you subscreibe to the RSS feed, you will probably have to resubscribe after the move.

I’m trying to get this done while the blog is still young (it’s 32 days old today) and before it gets too many followers (being optimistic — except for the three-day weekend, I’ve enjoyed a boost in traffic most of the last week or so, creating a greater sense of urgency to get set up as a self-hosted blog). And since I’m not sure I can resume my blog stats where they leave off when I move from WordPress, I do not want to let a large number of hits build up just top start at zero again. Finally, I’ve been holding off on many of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other steps for increasing the blog’s visibility until it moves to its own host (those steps are listed at http://seobergen.no).

I plan to keep the same general look on the blog (the maroon-to-black banner, fonts, etc.), though I may have to make some changes in the course of switching to the new host.

This won’t happen for a while, but I wanted to give everyone fair warning and explain what I will be doing and why I will be doing it. I also want to mininmize any loss of readership due to the transition. My target date to complete this process is June 18, but that’s likely to slip. I will post updates as the project progresses.