Big shout out to two of our BlogHarbor/PressHarbor bloggers (both started blogging on our BlogHarbor platform and migrated recently to PressHarbor, to our new WordPress hosting service) who are speaking at the event.

Matthew Cerrone, publisher of MetsBlog, is speaking at several presentations in the sports blogging track.

And Des Walsh, who blogs with us at Thinking Home Business, spoke at several presentations yesterday at the executive track.

If you’re here, let’s get together!!!

Over the past couple of days, my blog got:

- Boing Boinged,
(http://www.boingboing.net/2007/09/23/simpsons-film-refere.html)

- Instalanched
(http://instapundit.com/archives2/009756.php)

- Metafiltered,
(http://www.metafilter.com/64936/D’oh)

- and Defamed
(http://defamer.com/hollywood/short-ends/no-tv-and-no-beer-make-homer-something-something-303231.php)

and still I see no slowdowns and have had no tech support people emailing me to tell me that they had to take my site down. My heartiest compliments to you and the rest of the PressHarbor crew!

How’s that for a testimonial?

Thanks, Joey!

Now, since I’ve talked so much about why I left [for] WordPress, I’m sure you expect a description of the actual migration process. I’m afraid I’ll disappoint: the migration was a non-event. I made the call, and two days later my blog was up an running on WordPress. Old posts, comments, trackbacks, pictures – Pressharbor took care of it. My main concern was not to lose links, trackbacks to old posts: while Blogware had their own cryptic permalink structure, on WordPress I am using the SEO-friendly title-based permalink formula. Pressharbor set up 301 redirects for every single of my old posts, and in a few days I saw Google reindex all and point to the new permalinks.

A great read for anyone considering a move to our new PressHarbor platform.

Matt wanted to move to WordPress to offer some additional functionality to his community that was not possible with a Blogware-based blog, so he chose to move his site to our new PressHarbor plaform. On Saturday night, we moved over 10,000 articles to his new WordPress site; Matt woke up this morning to find that all of his articles for the past 3 years were now in his new blog… He was pretty excited about the move, and his readers were very enthusiastic about the change, saying that the new site was “blazing fast”, “incredibly fast,” “superfast”…

Best of luck on MetsBlog 3.0, Matt!

Technorati Tags: PressHarbor, WordPress

1. This blog has now been migrated to WordPress from our BlogHarbor platform.
2. PressHarbor is alive.

The second point is the most exciting. We’ve been working on building a new platform for WordPress blog hosting that offers:

• WordPress preinstalled
• Automatic updates of WordPress to the latest version

PressHarbor will also offer such features as Pro-blogger level Akismet spam protection included, which would normally cost $55/year if you purchased your own Akismet pro-blogger key. We’ve also been able to solve some key migration issues for our BlogHarbor and other Blogware users who want to move to WordPress, such as preservation and redirection of your current links to preserve and enhance your Google ranking, not to mention making the transition easier as your readers’ bookmarks will continue to function, redirecting them seamlessly to the new location of your pages. A lot of what we’ve learned will help us migrate any user from other blog platforms to our PressHarbor WordPress service, including and especially Typepad and MovableType bloggers.

So I am the guinea pig – somebody had to go first. And I do have to say, the transition was quite smooth… All of the original articles, comments, and trackbacks were migrated, and their URLs redirect cleanly to the new URLs with the right codes to let Google know that the new location is permanent…

Looking good so far here on July 1. PressHarbor is getting set to sail.