Monday, 12-Sep-11 23:16:00 CEST

Search and thou shalt find

I have ported this blog from Blogger to BlogEngine.NET. That was much work. It is still much work because old entries are not found.  Since I want also old entries to be found I need to work with redirects. My first attempt was to use webmaster tools to give me a list of what is missing. I had hoped that I would be able to rely only on what webmaster tools are saying about missing documents so that I can fix these. That is not working. It is too slow. I gave up on this tonight. A secondary problem was that I figured out that I failed to port some blog entries. I am really puzzled about this.

Anyway now I have a new strategy. I search for all non ASPX pages from my site. My new blog platform uses ASPX pages so this is a robust search query. Then I test all links from the Googles result page that they are working. One by one.

If the link is failing then I go through a little manual repair protocol. Here it is:

1. Is the link working? So yes inspect the next link in the search list and go to point 1 again. If the search link is not working then go to point 2.
2. In the internal search function of the blog, search for the blog post. If the blog post is available then go to point 3. If the blog post is missing then go to point 6.
3. The permanent redirect is not set up. In the website directory of the server; create a dummy page at the location and file name as the missing entry in the search result. Go to 4.
4. In the web server, change the properties of the new dummy page so that it produces a permanent redirect to the new blog post as you found on the internal search of point 2. Now go to point 5.
5. Test the created redirect again. If it works then go to the next link from the search result. Go to point 1.
6. The blog post is missing. Click the cache of the search result. Find the backup of this and insert this into the new blog platform or recreate the blog post from the cache: Copy the texts, Set up the pictures, Copy the subject, Copy the labels (categories), Copy the time of the post. Now search for the newly created post so you can continue with point 2.

When I was done with this post I noticed that my carefully written list of points were showing no numbers. I turns out that the Garland-Revisited theme has a bug in style.css. On line 3 of the css it says "padding:0;" Commented this. Then I added "#dropmenu" to line 13. Then the number bullets worked here.