betalogue.com no longer redirects

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Blogging
July 12th, 2005 • 12:07 am

Most Betalogue readers visit the site at its regular address, i.e. www.latext.com/pm/betalogue.

However, a couple of years ago, I posted a note about the fact that I had registered and parked the betalogue.com domain name and that it could be used as an alternative to access my main web site.

Well, the time has come to actually use this domain name and move this blog to its own proper address. Call it my “summer project”.

Unfortunately, things are a bit more complicated than I’d like them to be, for a variety of reasons. The first one is that I am switching providers. My current provider is OK, but its offerings are no longer competitive and I am paying too much money for too little space. Also, I am switching to a provider that will let me host two web sites (betalogue.com and latext.com) under a single plan.

The second problem is that I am also switching blogging systems. Right now, I am still using pMachine, which suffers from significant limitations — most notably the rather user-hostile URLs for blog entries. pMachine has been discontinued as a product and pMachine the company would probably like me to upgrade to ExpressionEngine. It’s too expensive for me, however, and I don’t want to be “locked in” once more and be caught in 2 years time when pMachine decides once again to discontinue a product and replace it with yet another product that’s 4 times as expensive. It’s not my idea of a healthy business-customer relationship.

Since I have a fair amount of experience with WordPress, having used it to set up a dynamic web site for my employer, that’s the system that I am going to be switching to. The price is right (WordPress is open source) and it should work well.

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, there is no ready-made migration tool to switch from pMachine to WordPress. So I am going to have to do this “manually”, with BBEdit as the missing link and this page as a set of guidelines. Needless to say, I am not looking forward to this. I am especially concerned about non-ASCII characters, and I am not sure about user settings and all that stuff. We’ll see.

Of course, things are not made easier by the fact that I am still stuck with a dial-up connection, so any uploading or downloading takes time, lots of time.

All this to say that, for now, things haven’t changed for Betalogue readers, but they will be changing soon — hopefully for the better. The only thing right now is that betalogue.com no longer redirects you to this site. But there weren’t too many readers using that address anyway.

I will keep you posted. (If anyone with blogging experience has any suggestions about the pMachine-to-WordPress transition, feel free to share!)


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