Hello there, shiny new blog!

And hello there, shiny new website. Also: hello there, trusty readers who have followed me here!

Yesterday was a thoroughly exciting day, and I'm utterly happy and relieved that all went as well as it did. I had a lot of fun live-tweeting the migration, and I was really relieved that I had done so much preparation to make sure everything would work.

As it did, more or less - and now I can take a little more time getting used to the new place. New blogging platform, new shop layout, and I have added a lot of tweaks to my Joomla installation that should make it work better and hopefully also faster. (There's one more in the pipeline, but I'll give it a few days to settle any other issues first. No use in muddling up things more than necessary.)

So what did I do yesterday? I transferred the updated data (with current orders, customers and products) to the shop installation that was already on the server (not yet a live server). I transferred the old blog to the new spot here and adjusted the layout. (Theoretically, I could have done this with a couple of test posts and then only need small tweaks, but I figured it would all go okay in the one fell swoop.) I fixed link redirects from the old shop site to the new place, tried to make sure everything is working as it should, and tried very, very hard not to get distracted by small issues that could easily be fixed later. (If you're reading this blog on a mobile device, you are experiencing the biggest of the issues left: there's not yet a menu for the blog in the mobile view. I have an idea on how to integrate one, though, so you might find a menu link appearing right at the bottom of the page in mobile view in a few days.)

This was all possible to do in one day because of a lot of work invested beforehand. The new site was completely ready for the content from the shop and the blog to be plugged in, and I had tested the blog import a few times before. (Not the plugging in of data for the shop, so that was a bit of an adrenaline spike.) I have not done proper time tracking, but my rough estimate is that about 4 solid weeks' worth of work have gone into the new pages - and I'm happy about every minute spent on them. It was lovely to get things to work just right, or to appear just so (with a few exceptions that are left, but hey, nobody's perfect), and I also enjoyed learning about all kinds of things. How to tweak css. How to dabble in php (which on my level is mostly looking for someone who found a solution to my problem, or at least a very very similar one, and then copy-paste the code, cross my fingers, curl my toes and hope it works).

Having the migration thing still hovering on my to-do-list really was a big thing, and now it's done, a lot of the pressure is gone. Which is very good, as I'm behind on a bunch of other things, which are all on my list for today. Sometime next week, though, I'll have to go do some internetting work again, as the website for the Textile Forum needs to do a transfer to the new server as well.

For those of you who have missed it and would like a look, here are my tweets from yesterday, all storified up.

I hope you like the new look of the shop and blog - please do try out the new comment function, too, and tell me what you think!