Starting today, I’m moving my posts to a site hosted at WordPress.com. The site is named “b.smat.us” which allows old links to still retrieve old contents.

However, anyone typing in the regular URL, or following one of the old menus (recipes, Maypole, etc.) will go directly to this new site.

The old blog will become read only, and hopefully won’t need much future maintenance.

I originally hoped I could just change the new site address to http://www.smat.us, but that doesn’t quite work. The problem arises when accessing “archived” posts from the old site. My self-hosted WordPress site built archive links numerically, so an old post would be retrieved by number. On WordPress.com, they archive by date and a textual slug. You’ll see what I mean when you look at the URL for this page. You can visit this page on the old site by going to http://www.smat.us/archives/758. If you try to visit that path on the new site, you get “page not found.”

The transition process was persnickety in other ways, too. I needed to do a bunch of domain redirect stuff, and set up WordPress.com to accept the incoming URL. Then I retrained the old site to redirect all the major pages to the new site. I also fixed a few images that didn’t quite migrate correctly to the new site.

I’m hoping that a study of Google accesses to http://www.smat.us and careful use of redirects for several months may allow me to move this site from b.smat.us to http://www.smat.us.