Eric Walker

I can’t say for sure this will be my final solution but it has made sense so far. A little while ago that I wanted to give this a try as I don’t like having too many different places on the internet to hold where my stuff is. I had been stuck for a while thinking of a new domain name and in the meantime I bought about 10 (yikes!). Maybe I will point some of them to some specific stuff on Micro.blog but my main one now for this domain is going to just be EricMWalk.blog. I think I will make a simple static site that my EricMWalk.com can be pointed to and there I can point people to other projects I have worked on. However, right now it just goes to my old WordPress blog so still need to get that changed.

So I finally did it and moved all of my old posts from my self hosted WordPress blog to Micro.blog so I would have finally one source of information (well not exactly more on that later). Overall the import process in Micro.blog worked flawlessly except, I did find some issues but they were self inflicted for many reasons. The one I assumed I would run into was any links I had in my posts to other posts on my site which would not get updated correctly. I was right on that but luckily I didn’t have too many posts with that issue and I could correct that problem somewhat quickly by doing a search in the Micro.blog post section for my old site name. However, the two bigger unknowns to me that I probably should have expected but didn’t think about were having too many tags and that pictures didn’t import.

Tags - This was nightmare. I guess though the years on WordPress I got very Tag happy as it didn’t seem hard to just add them as you went and honestly I probably didn’t use them too much but to find related things or maybe others did. However, all of them got imported into Micro.blog and I quickly realized that my one off tags were very messy. So I went though and painfully deleted as many as I could. I still have more than I like but it was a good start to see how I can use tags going forward. I think the interesting thing for tags in Micro.blog is that they are their own feeds so I might do something with that at some point.

Pictures (Root Cause - Old Domain Names 🤦‍♂️) - This is a problem of having various domain names over the years. Micro.blog did an exactly what it was suppose to do and did an excellent job importing the photos to Micro.blog when it could “find” the photos. However, since some of the domains I don’t have anymore I had broken links on my WordPress site that I had not really realized so Micro.blog couldn’t find the photo to import. I am not sure if there is a quicker way to fix it on the Micro.blog side of things but honestly if I would have maybe thought about this before I exported everything I more than likely could have cleaned it up to make it work more seamlessly.

Other than those two minor hiccups I am glad to have gone full in on Micro.blog and with that I am hoping to be posting more photos, thoughts, and other things I find interesting all in one spot.

Next up…

Since I have not been using Facebook (forever really), and Instagram has been less and less. I stoped really posting to Facebook specifically a long time ago and just did instagram and my WordPress blog but since the beginning of 2021 I have been really using Micro.blog to post the quick photos I would have done there. So next up I am thinking of pulling all of my historic Instagram posts to Micro.blog after I ran across this help post.