How NOT To Do a Domain Change
General April 7th, 2008
Over the weekend I changed the main domain for my blog from thechrisblackwell.com to chrisblackwell.org, and I have given everyone a perfect case study of what NOT to do. I originally registered thechrisblackwell.com because chrisblackwell.com was already taken along with a few other variations. However, I was starting to get too many questions on why I had “the” so I decided to go with a .org domain and simply have my name. The problem is the domain change, and how I went about switching them, was an absolute disaster!
I lost all my subscribers and comments!
When I made the domain change I immediately went to FeedBurner to update the domain and feed details. The next morning when I checked by feed subscription numbers, I got a big surprise when I saw a 0 staring back at me. I posted a small test post, waited an hour, then checked my Google Reader to see if the feed was still being updated. Nope! My Google Reader didn’t see the new post and was still linking to the old domain.
So I’ve lost all my subscribers to my blog that I’ve spent months building up. Well, at least it can’t get any worse, right? Wrong! As I started looking around my blog I started to notice something very quickly. No Comments! I still don’t know what happened to all my comments, but they got all deleted in the move somehow. I am very upset by this as I cherish all my comments and some readers had some very informative information and links.
Hopefully these are all the problems and nothing else will or can go wrong. If you have posted a comment on my blog before, you have my sincerest apologies. Please subscribe again to my blog and help me recover some of what I have lost. Thank you everyone for your kind patience and understanding.
