I have a blog on wordpress.com that I'm moving over to one of my own servers. I've got the new server installed and have exported the old content and have put it up on the new server.
What is an effective way of redirecting old users and web links to my new server?
The old blog is a free install and doesn't seem to let me install plugins.
Is there a better way to push links to my new server, other than hacking each post with an "I've moved to here" link?
This should be exactly what you're looking for: Offsite Redirect provided by WordPress.com
The best way to keep your visitors to keep going to your new wordpress site is to create a Sticky and just leave it on the wordpress.com blog until you feel like you've had most of them switch over.
Also, if you had an RSS feed that was linked upto your wordpress.com blog using Feedburner, I'd suggest read up on their instructions on how to migrate the old feed into the new one (or vice versa) and you'll have better luck with the RSS readers as well.
I have my url point to by blog. So, http://sourcetonuts.com points to http://sourcetonuts.wordpress.com. I can now move it at anytime, I'll just leave a note about my blog moving to sourcetonuts.com as my final post once when I leave.
Check out Blog Migrator. Originally designed to get folks from BlogML to SquareSpace, there are some WordPress options in there as well.
More importantly, it has a feature that will use the XML-RPC library to update your old server posts and redirect them to your new server posts, since it can track the Id.
Since the redirect depends on the Ids generated by the source and destination blogs, you may have to do a fresh migration in order for it to work. The tool uses a simple CSV file containing the source and destination posts, so if you could generate that file yourself, you could use the "rewriter" part of the tool to do the updates.
Disclosure: I am the original author of the blog migrator tool, but I think it could help you...
