The Great Migration
The glass of Prosecco in an antique glass? Self-congratulation for the time-consuming and somewhat tedious task of moving VOICETALK from Blogger to Squarespace.
It all started with acknowledging that my ten year old platform wasn’t doing me much good separate from my studio website. What to do? Migrate the blog to the studio website’s platform. As it turns out, this was the easiest part—the steps coming after migration being rather involved. For those contemplating something similar, here is some of what I encountered.
Since I had a custom domain that I used at Blogger, I had to connect it to Squarespace in order for readers to find the new platform—readers clicking on the old domain being taken to the new one. You’d think this would be a simple process, but it turned out to be week-long endeavor which involved chatting with Squarespace, then GoDaddy—the key DNS settings involved not being accessible. I lost track of the number of helpful people involved before all was said and done. Suffice it to say, I just kept at it until I found someone on the Squarespace end who could tell me exactly what I needed to tell the GoDaddy people.
While I was figuring out how to connect the custom domain to Squarespace, I was also reformatting 588 posts, curated from 803 original posts, deleting those that didn’t make the cut before migration—this being a bit easier to do on Blogger’s platform. Reformatting meant adding photos as well as reconfiguring each page since the migrated formatting was a mess. Sorting this out took more than three weeks.
The last big step was a process called URL mapping; necessary for readers who have bookmarked original posts, as well as for Google to more easily index the new platform. Since I could not use one URL “redirect” for all migrated posts as suggested (the front and back end of the redirect must must be identical for this to happen), I had to write out 588 redirects. Having already completed reformatting, this seemed rather swift in that it only took two days.
Has it been worth it?
You better believe it. Readers want high quality presentation, which Squarespace provides in spades, and I can already see via the site’s analytics that VOICETALK’s numbers are up. More singers and voice teachers educating themselves the teachings of great voice teachers? It’s a good thing.
The future?
Now that the great migration has taken place, I look forward to going back to doing what I do best: writing about historical vocal pedagogy.
I want to thank long-time readers who have found their way to this page (please take a minute to re-subscribe), as well as new readers who are interested in historical vocal pedagogy—the traditions and teachings of legendary singing teachers, their students, and disciples.
As always, I welcome your thoughts, comments, and observations.
Thank you for reading VOICETALK.
