I have called my blog “helen blog” since the tail end of my Blogger days, and kept the name when I made the switch to WordPress (a very good switch for me, it turns out). It seems fitting that it finally gets to actually live at helen.blog, and I decided to do the right thing and move to HTTPS while I was at it.
.blog is available for “landrush” applications through Automattic, which runs the WordPress.com service. WordPress.com is great, and I keep my WordPress-specific thoughts over there for a number of reasons, but I like running WordPress for myself so I remain a user. It’s humbling, really. The trepidation of hitting the switch on a domain name change, navigating the HTTPS waters – even before getting to the WordPress part, running a site can be hard. And then there’s the WordPress part, which I’m always trying to make better.
I have to thank two tools in particular for making this a relatively easy move (for a developer). First is wp-cli, whose search-replace command saved my sanity. The other is Let’s Encrypt, which makes running my personal site over HTTPS practical. With those, I have to give a shout to this site’s host, SiteGround, which provides wp-cli by default and Let’s Encrypt through cPanel even for shared hosting, making all of this as painless as possible. They also have supported using PHP 7.0 since beta, which combined with this site running nightlies, makes me quite the tester of my own breakage 🙂
4 responses to “helen blog, now at helen.blog!”
Awesome!
We should make the search/replace + changing domain thing much easier, it’s pretty much impossible without advanced tools and know-how. 4.7?
There are some related things I’d probably prioritize first if it comes to that (import process comes to mind), but I do think that the stance of “moving a site is an edge case” is not grounded in today’s reality. That said, the first thing I did for this move was look to see if my host had a tool for it, since it seems like a thing that a host could be particularly good at handling.
Congrats on this brand new domain. I’ve claimed mine too, not sure when I’ll have that on my disposal. Waiting for it and excited 😀
Good going! You may want to add a 301 Redirect in your
.htaccessfile from HTTP to HTTPS as well.