Possible Re-hosting Of Website - Input Requested

[ckuske]

Sorry it has taken so long to get back, but we've had a houseful of Bullnose folks.

Anyway, thanks for the ideas and the offer. I'm going to try to work with Weebly on the issues this week, but if that doesn't go well then I think I'd like to take you up on the offer to test Wordpress. From what I've read the migration tool takes the backup I download and converts to Wordpress. Then that is uploaded to a hosting service and you have to go in and see what it looks like.

If we could do that on yours that would make it much easier to find out if it is going to work. Then if it does I can set up an account and do the migration to that.

I'm also thinking about getting a new domain name that is more descriptive of what we are doing than Gary's Garagemahal. And this would seem to be the time to make that happen. Let the Garagemahal site work as we get the new one up and tweaked, and then redirect the URLs to the new one.

Thoughts?

No worries! I figured so, I know the truck show was this week. I wish my truck was ready for a drive like that (coming from CA)! I hope it went well.

Your plan sounds good. There are couple ways to manage it if you wanted to keep the current domain name. We could just update the DNS record for the site to go a new IP for a "all at once" migration or like you said, just redirect this site to a new one. Either way is just fine. It probably makes more sense for this one to stay up and running until we are out of the woods.

Are you going to keep the Nabble forum?

bullnosebible.com and thebullnosebible.com are both available, FYI

[Gary Lewis]

No worries! I figured so, I know the truck show was this week. I wish my truck was ready for a drive like that (coming from CA)! I hope it went well.

Your plan sounds good. There are couple ways to manage it if you wanted to keep the current domain name. We could just update the DNS record for the site to go a new IP for a "all at once" migration or like you said, just redirect this site to a new one. Either way is just fine. It probably makes more sense for this one to stay up and running until we are out of the woods.

Are you going to keep the Nabble forum?

bullnosebible.com and thebullnosebible.com are both available, FYI

I was a bit reluctant to actually say which URL's I was considering for fear someone would take them, but you nailed them. Does anyone have a preference?

As for Nabble, I haven't found a migration tool to anything from Nabble. But maybe you can?

W/o a way to migrate I can't see changing. But going phpBB on Wordpress might be nice if we could keep our current content.

[ckuske]

I was a bit reluctant to actually say which URL's I was considering for fear someone would take them, but you nailed them. Does anyone have a preference?

As for Nabble, I haven't found a migration tool to anything from Nabble. But maybe you can?

W/o a way to migrate I can't see changing. But going phpBB on Wordpress might be nice if we could keep our current content.

Oops, sorry I let the cat out of the bag. Hopefully it isn't an issue.

I haven't seen anything except for companies offering to migrate your data for a fee. Probably not worth it, and we should focus on one issue at a time haha.

[Vic Roma]

I was a bit reluctant to actually say which URL's I was considering for fear someone would take them, but you nailed them. Does anyone have a preference?

As for Nabble, I haven't found a migration tool to anything from Nabble. But maybe you can?

W/o a way to migrate I can't see changing. But going phpBB on Wordpress might be nice if we could keep our current content.

Facebook started as "thefacebook.com" then dropped the definite article "the".

Choose the first domain name, it reads/sounds better.

[Gary Lewis]

Facebook started as "thefacebook.com" then dropped the definite article "the".

Choose the first domain name, it reads/sounds better.

Thanks. Was thinking about that late last night.

[Gary Lewis]

Thanks. Was thinking about that late last night.

Ok guys, another Wordpress question. What ways can pdf's be put on a Wordpress page?

I ask because we have 10's if not 100's of pdf's on the site. They are hosted on my OneDrive and embedded on pages on the Weebly site. But, apparently because they aren't really on the site Google doesn't crawl them so they cannot be found in a Google search.

What we need is a way to get Google to crawl the pdf's so people can find them.

I've been reading about Wordpress and I've found two different ways of placing them on - the iframe approach I'm using now and things like PDF Embedder Premium. Does anyone know about the ability for Google to crawl pdf's embedded that way?

[Gary Lewis]

Ok guys, another Wordpress question. What ways can pdf's be put on a Wordpress page?I ask because we have 10's if not 100's of pdf's on the site. They are hosted on my OneDrive and embedded on pages on the Weebly site. But, apparently because they aren't really on the site Google doesn't crawl them so they cannot be found in a Google search.What we need is a way to get Google to crawl the pdf's so people can find them.I've been reading about Wordpress and I've found two different ways of placing them on - the iframe approach I'm using now and things like PDF Embedder Premium. Does anyone know about the ability for Google to crawl pdf's embedded that way?

Not to take away from the previous question, which really does need to be answered, but I have "purchased" the URL bullnosebible.com. So some day we'll use that instead of garysgaragemahal.com.

 

I'm still thinking that we are going to have to move to Wordpress. Another Weebly staff member has concurred that our site has outgrown them, and we are no where near "done". So I've been doing a lot of reading, both about Wordpress itself as well as hosting sites.

 

Oddly enough, looking at the rate structures on one hosting site we are already about to top out the max # of visits/month that their base rate allows. That's 20k/month, and in the last 30 days according to Weebly we've had 18.3K, which is up 7% over the previous 30 day period. So the site is more of a presence than I thought.

[ckuske]

Ok guys, another Wordpress question. What ways can pdf's be put on a Wordpress page?

I ask because we have 10's if not 100's of pdf's on the site. They are hosted on my OneDrive and embedded on pages on the Weebly site. But, apparently because they aren't really on the site Google doesn't crawl them so they cannot be found in a Google search.

What we need is a way to get Google to crawl the pdf's so people can find them.

I've been reading about Wordpress and I've found two different ways of placing them on - the iframe approach I'm using now and things like PDF Embedder Premium. Does anyone know about the ability for Google to crawl pdf's embedded that way?

Hi Gary,

It's difficult to prove, but I have a theory is that it has to do with the pages being externally hosted.

If we pulled them in to be hosted on the same domain, they would be indexed. As far as I can tell, there's no issues with Google indexing

The three mainstream ways to embed PDFs in a page seem to be:

Google Docs also has a way to embed PDFs, even if the content isn't on Google Drive. (Kinda like you are doing with Live)

If it were me doing it, I'd probably try

-Chris

 

[Gary Lewis]

Hi Gary,

It's difficult to prove, but I have a theory is that it has to do with the pages being externally hosted.

If we pulled them in to be hosted on the same domain, they would be indexed. As far as I can tell, there's no issues with Google indexing

The three mainstream ways to embed PDFs in a page seem to be:

Google Docs also has a way to embed PDFs, even if the content isn't on Google Drive. (Kinda like you are doing with Live)

If it were me doing it, I'd probably try

-Chris

Chris - I think we are in agreement. But let me take it a step more: I believe it has to do with Google not knowing who has permission to access the file, and since they don't know they don't bother to index it since they don't want to show search results to someone that cannot access them.

It looks to me like there's a way around that, and that is to make the files accessible to anyone on the web. But in doing that they'll be found outside of the website as well as maybe inside. I don't want the traffic to go around the website, so I've set them up as accessible to anyone with the link.

So you may be correct that hosting the files on the same place that hosts the site may work. But we need to figure that out 'cause a whole bunch of our content isn't being found.

[ckuske]

Chris - I think we are in agreement. But let me take it a step more: I believe it has to do with Google not knowing who has permission to access the file, and since they don't know they don't bother to index it since they don't want to show search results to someone that cannot access them.

It looks to me like there's a way around that, and that is to make the files accessible to anyone on the web. But in doing that they'll be found outside of the website as well as maybe inside. I don't want the traffic to go around the website, so I've set them up as accessible to anyone with the link.

So you may be correct that hosting the files on the same place that hosts the site may work. But we need to figure that out 'cause a whole bunch of our content isn't being found.

If we can make/upload our own HTML file to the site, we should be able see by uploading a PDF file and embedding the PDF file in that HTML file.

You can then use the Google tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none) to ask it to crawl the website and we can see if it works. It takes a few days though.

Also, I noticed the robots.txt (http://www.garysgaragemahal.com/robots.txt) on the site has some pages blocked. It seems Weebly adds some entries automatically. The link you sent above noted this as well.