So you may be wondering: what’s up with all these blog redesigns, Daniel?

Well, I got sick of Blogger. A whole lot. And about a month ago, I decided to do something about it.

At first, I switched out the Blogger theme and made it look less stupid and dark and boring. Then I decided to start transcribing ALL of the 10+ years of blog posts from Blogger into WordPress. This was the super tedious part, especially when it came to date and timestamps. But it was a fascinating history lesson into my own life from early college onward.

So as of TODAY, I have officially switched https://blog.ppsstudios.com over to a WordPress site! And you should not really notice anything different in navigation because I spent a LOT of time so far making sure everything was shipshape and unbroken.

Here is an outline of what I’ve done and what I still plan to do:

• 2018-something-something: Switch Blogger theme to “modernize.”
• 2018-06-08: 1st phase of manual copy – This should be simple. As long as I change the publish date properly in WordPress. Hmm.. except Youtube-hosted animation was a big thing back in 2008. Maybe …oh hey, WordPress totally translates Youtube links as embeds!
• 2018-06-18: 2nd phase of manual copy – I now realize that inline code and code blocks need some special attention. I apply the “Crayon” plugin from WordPress.org. It’s outdated and immediately Wordfence alerts me that it’s been abandoned. But I don’t care. I like it!

Oh, I didn’t realize that Blogger stuck .html at the end of EVERY SINGLE POST. Time to look up a .htaccess redirect option.

• 2018-08-01: 3rd phase of manual copy – Yeah, it’s a pain now. Fifteen to thirty pictures on how to set up a stupid DNS on cPanel was hard the FIRST time.

Oh and Blogger now sticks p/  onto the front of pages in addition to that annoying .html . Yet one more redirect is in order.

I think I have everything. https://www.ppsstudios.com/blog/  has been live for two months and I think is ready to switch over to https://blog.ppsstudios.com !

Wait, no. 404? How could this be? Uhh…wordpress post GUIDs are all on the old domain, is that it? No? Uhhhhh…

I decide to switch back to the original www.ppsstudios.com/blog/  URL. I can throw in some fancy redirects into my Apache config to point the blog subdomain back in. And then I’ll rely on .htaccess  to handle actual pages and posts.

Oh but wait. https://blog.ppsstudios.com/2008/06/far-side.html  doesn’t work when I re-configure Google Analytics!? Why not? Oh…because in WordPress, I named it “THE Far Side,” and so the slug (permalink) automatically assumed /blog/the-far-side . Well great. Manually scan all Blogger posts and fix many slugs in WordPress to match the old format. Because I actually care about maintaining my Google crawl data.

Now, I need to access old Blogger and old Blogger page data. Looks like deleting blog.ppsstudios.com  as a custom domain is in order so that I can once again access via danipavliashvili2.blogspot.com .

• 2018-08-07: Added MORE tags to all longer posts! We are now nice and concise on the /posts/page/##/ pages.