I realized that one of the biggest barriers to posting frequently has been a lack of organization on my part. My blogs were way too fragmented, difficult to manage, and didn’t have a consistent, efficient workflow.

There are numerous times every day when I run across a new idea, concept, or ‘Wow’ moment that I want to post about. My motivation, in some cases, is just to capture the thought and its context to make sure that I don’t lose track of it. In other cases, I think the topic will be of considerable interest to my readers.

The basic problem was blog workflow-

But, because my blogs lacked a consistent focus, and were hosted on different platforms with different blogging engines – Typepad and WordPress. I frequently found myself hesitating to post because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to capture the thought. The ‘content’, by that I mean the thought itself, was clear, but the implementation method to grab it and preserve it for posterity wasn’t. A ton of good ideas, thoughts, and possible business opportunities, were lost forever in the internet ether never to see the light of day again.

Obviously, something needed to be done. A decision was crying to be made. It seemed clear that my preferred blogging platform needed to be WordPress for a number of reasons. The large number of plug-ins, strong user base, numerous WordPress online support and training resources, and the search engine ranking benefits that WordPress is so well known for.

Setting up a reseller hosting account-

So, I bit the bullet and setup a new hosting account at MDDHosting.com. Based on knowledgeable advice from one of my blogging resources, I went with a Reseller account. That might seem a bit odd, but I had valid reasons.

First, by using a reseller account I can setup each new blog in its own separate hosted package. This approach gives each blog a lot of clarity and independence. It makes it logically simple to deal with, and keeps all of the blog content grouped together so that it can be managed and backed-up as a self-contained unit.

Second, if sometime down the road I find that one of the blogs needs to be deleted or have major changes, I can do that without worrying about the potential of accidentally deleting or disabling my other blogs.

Third, if I am lucky enough to be able to sell one of my blog properties in the future, having them configured in this fashion will make it simple to transfer the entire account and files to the new owner with a minimum of impact.

Fourth, the cost difference wasn’t a major factor. A reseller account was about $10 more expensive than the basic stand-alone account, so the benefits far outweighed the small cost differential.

Moving existing WordPress blogs-

The first step was to move one of my existing blogs, lemfugitt.com, from a hosting account at GoDaddy over to the new MDDHosting reseller account. The process was fairly straight forward, though I did make a few minor but recoverable mistakes along the way.

1. Create a new package to contain the blog in the reseller account.
2. Create a new account using the new package. This included setting quotas, usernames, passwords, and email.
3. Export the WordPress database for the blog on GoDaddy.
4. Edit the nameservers for the domain at GoDaddy. For the time being I decided to keep the domain at GoDaddy and just have it point to the new hosting account. Changing too many factors all at once is a recipe for confusion and possible disaster.
5. Setup a new SQL database for the blog.
6. Edit and install WordPress
7. Import the blog database. In this case I decided to change the name of the author of all the imported posts.
8. Install a set of WordPress plug-ins including Askimet.
9. Change the blog theme. To keep things clean and simple, I picked a very neat two column theme.

Setting up a blog is simpler than you imagine-

As I mentioned above, there were a few hiccups along the way. I had to go back and change a username/password, and I got one of the plug-in settings wrong. In both cases, all I had to do was to backtrack and carefully retrace my steps. The WordPress documentation is very clear and well written. And, when all else fails, a quick Google search immediately provided enough information to resolve the problems.

One mistake that was a bit more troublesome – I failed to realize that all the graphic resources referenced in blog posts needed to be moved over to the new blog installation. Somehow I assumed it would automatically be taken care of by the WordPress Export/Import app. Once I discovered the problem it was simple to download the images from the old installation and paste them into the new blog file structure using the Filezilla FTP app.

The total amount of time I spent in migrating this particular blog was less than an hour. As time goes on and I gain more experience, it will go faster, and I will have enough knowledge to explore more options.

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