When converting a site from Joomla to WordPress (or changing platforms), do not change the category structure or the file naming convention. In other words, don’t do what I did.

Old School

When the site was hand coded, there was only one way to access any page on the site. All a reader had to do was type in the static URL and boom…there was the page! With content management systems such as Joomla and WordPress (yes, I call WordPress a content management system), it’s different.

It wasn’t until after I received over 600 “File not found” errors (started at 90 a day and has now trickled to only 10 or 15 a day) that I had a V-8 moment.

My old school thought process of accessing each page via one URL was outdated. With content management systems, pages can be accessed in a variety of ways. I won’t get into the whole relational database structure reasoning for why that is, but take my word for it.

Changing with the Times

In the past when I changed platforms all I had to do was insert a “change of address” line from the old webpage to the new. Now, with at least 10 ways to access any one page from my old Joomla site, the redirects seem endless. You see, something as simple as including or excluding the forward slash (/) at the end of a URL can generate a “File not found” error if things aren’t redirected correctly.

So, this Redirect Queen has been putting out redirect fires as they happen. I was pleased yesterday when I only received 11 crawl errors.

How do I Find the Errors?

There are two ways to track errors. The easy and not so thorough way is by checking my Statcounter stats. When I see “Page not found” in the log, I know I need to address the problem.

The other more complete way is by signing into my Google Webmaster account. There they list all of the errors Google encounters when the bots crawl my site. Some of the errors are because of redirects but some of the errors are a result of incorrect link backs. I see some of the sites linking to Tidbits were incorrectly coded.

Additionally, I’ve found that Joomla created a few pages that made absolutely no sense to me, but I’ve redirected them anyway.

When will it End?

The way I calculate it, I fully expect to be resolving redirects for a couple of months. Fortunately, each day there are fewer and fewer redirects and I’ve got it down to a science. I can now complete my daily redirect duty before I finish my first cup of coffee.

BTW, if you find yourself with the same problem (hopefully you won’t), there’s a plugin that helps to make the redirection process a little easier. The plugin is appropriately called Redirection .

Ya gotta love this stuff or else you wouldn’t do it.

I noticed on Prerna and Kidgas’ blogs they had a neat little linking tool that linked to other posts within their blogs.  I didn’t notice it at first, but as I continued to visit their blogs, I thought the tool was pretty cool.

The tool, as you can see at the bottom of this post, is the LinkWithin tool.  It’s a plugin that works on Blogger, self-hosted WordPress, TypePad and other types of blogs.  The installation is pretty straight forward and simple.

Installing LinkWithin

Visit the LinkWithin site and insert your email address, blog URL, number of posts you’d like linked and click “Get Widget!”  For those of you with dark-background blogs, let LinkWithin know and they’ll modify the code so your links show up with light text and dark backgrounds.

Once you click the “Get Widget!” button, LinkWithin displays the appropriate code for the platform selected.

Leaving Well Enough Alone

Of course I could never leave well enough alone.  After installing the code, I realized there weren’t many customization options. The links aligned to the left at the bottom of the post and that was it.  It also displayed the default text of “You might also like:” prior to showing the post links.

That’s not a problem for most folks, but because of my anal retentive nature and my inability to leave well enough alone, I had to look under the hood for a moment. According to the LinkWithin FAQ sheet, you could modify the display location and the default text, but that was pretty much it.  So, I modified both.

Centering the LinkWithin Display

Until I dedicate sufficient time to look for a replacement blog template, I’ll continue to limp along with this one. So, in accordance with the instructions on the LinkWithin site, I inserted the code “<div class="linkwithin_div"></div>” where I wanted the links to display.

To center the display, I embedded it within an HTML table. I tried using <span align=”center”> and <p align=”center”> and any other simple HTML code that I could think of to center the display, but it didn’t work (I think my blog template prevented it from working). So, I ended up placing it in a table that was center aligned.

Modifying the Default Text

Modifying the text was a piece of cake. According to the LinkWithin site all you had to do was insert  <script>linkwithin_text='Your custom text:'</script> into the HTML template.  To accomplish this, I went back to the original code and placed the revised text smack dab in the middle of it so it ended up looking like this:

<div class="linkwithin_div"><script>linkwithin_text='If you have time, check out these posts too:'</script></div>

Now that I had my code in the middle of my center-aligned table, I was relatively happy with the results (although, I believe there is too much dead white space around the plugin, but there’s nothing I can do about that).

Many moons ago, I wrote a post about learning basic HTML. With today’s WordPress, TypePad and Blogger templates, it’s not an absolute necessity to learn basic HTML, but it does come in handy.

Back in the Stone Age when I first got online I barely knew what a sitemap was. I spent some time reading in various forums trying to find out what it was and if it was something important. What I read back then was that it didn’t really make a difference if you told Google about your sitemap because Google would find your content sooner or later. With info like that, I didn’t bother creating or uploading a sitemap.

Change of Heart

More recently I became a little frustrated because I added a Google Search function to one of my sites, but it proved to be useless because most of the pages of my site weren’t indexed. Without having the pages indexed, the search results were rather pitiful.

In an attempt to change that I decided to submit my sitemap to Google to help them index my entire site. While I don’t know if adding a sitemap does anything for your website’s rankings or whether or not it gets your new pages indexed faster, what I do know is that not having pages indexed in Google means that visitors can’t find them.

Results of Adding a Sitemap

On April 24th I submitted my sitemap to Google (I know the date because I checked my ‘To Done’ list). When I first added it I only had 128 pages out of over 400 pages indexed. Three days later on April 27 the number of pages indexed pages jumped from 128 to 235 pages. On April 28th the number of pages increased from 235 to 264. Yesterday (5/4/2010) I checked and I found that 436 pages of my site were indexed by Google. Wow, the power of a sitemap.

Fluke or a Process

I was so impressed with the indexing thoroughness that I decided to submit my NJFM sitemap to Google. When I first submitted it on April 28th only 190 pages were indexed. Yesterday, the number jumped to 233 pages and as of today, 336 NJFM pages are now indexed by Google.

As I said earlier, it may not improve page ranking or site popularity, but it does make it easier for readers to find my sites.

Generating Sitemaps

For my WordPress blogs, I used a plug-in called XML Sitemap Generator to generate the sitemap.

For my Joomla website I downloaded a plug-in called XMap . It creates both an XML and an HTML site map. For those of you not familiar with the XML and HTML, XML is what Google uses to index your site and HTML creates a web page that’s readable by humans.

There are also free site map generators that work just as well. Some of the free sitemap services limit the number of pages of the sitemap. Here are a couple that I found:

• Sitemap Builder (limit 1000 pages)
• XML Sitemaps (limit 500 pages).

Once you have your site map generated, log into your Google Webmaster Account and click on the “Configuration”  link to access the “Sitemap” page. All you have to do is tell Google where your site map is located and click “Submit.”

One thing I have noticed, however, is the disparity between the number of pages indexed shown in the Google Webmaster account and the actual Google search engine. The Webmaster tool shows a lower index count. I use the Google search engine to determine the total number of pages indexed because that’s how folks find my sites.

To find out the number of pages indexed using the Google search engine type “site:domainname.com” into the Google search engine (remove the quotes). Google will display the number of pages indexed.

Some time ago, I wrote a post about switching one of my Google-step-child-sites from a hand coded site to a Joomla site. I made the switch because I originally hand coded the site several years ago and things have changed since then (and I’ve learned a lot since then).

Not to belabor the point (for the folks who have heard the story before), but I originally created the site when I was new to the world of the internet, used content from free article directories plus my own content and started making money. Back then I didn’t know that original content was key and my earnings and traffic eventually plummeted along with my Google rankings.

Not wanting to give up on the site, I decided to use Joomla as the back end platform because I had great ideas and visions for the site. Joomla (WordPress on steroids) seemed to be the right tool for the job. A website with about 400 pages and a set menu structure seemed to be too complex for WordPress. Although converting my site to Joomla was a large task, I felt it was the platform that would best serve the site…until now.

Recent Observations with the Site

I’ve let the site sit dormant, sort of, over the last few months. I would add a discarded eHow or Demand Studios article to it, but pretty much let it sit. I still get a few hundred hits a day on it, but the traffic is way down from its heyday.

One of my recent observations is that each of my WordPress blog posts, whether its here on NJFM or on other less popular blogs, are indexed by Google within 10 minutes or so. My new articles on the Joomla site are indexed in a week or so, if ever. Go figure.

I’ve got a blog that I started a few months ago, and it gets indexed more quickly than the Joomla site. The Joomla site has been around for about 4 years. I added new articles each day last week and only 3 of the seven have been indexed. Hmmm…..

A Wonderful Joomla Plugin

Last night when I originally wrote this blog post it had a different ending. It’s amazing what comes to you in the quiet hours of the morning before your brain is fully up and running.

Like a bolt, the thought entered my mind “Ping.” Yep, ping services, that’s why the WordPress blogs are so quickly indexed by Google. Joomla needs a ping service to let the whole world know that new content had been added to the site.

Lo and behold as I did a search this morning I found Easy Ping  for Joomla. It’s simple to install and configure. I downloaded, installed and configured it in about 3 minutes. This little plugin saved me from converting a 400 page site into a WordPress blog.

Only Time will Tell

Over the next few weeks I’ll continue to add content to the site to see if the extension is the answer to my problem. If not…I guess I’ll have to begin the conversion process.

In the meanwhile, I’m working on switching yet another old hand coded site that I created back in the late 90’s to a WordPress blog. There’s always something to keep me busy.

The other day as I was browsing the internet (when I was supposed to be working) I came across Joomla. I don’t know what rock I’ve been hiding under, but Joomla is like WordPress on steroids. It’s a free open source content management system.

Nothing to Lose

As I’ve mentioned before, my Tidbits & Stuff site is my online playground. It allows me to learn, make mistakes, earn a few bucks, make mistakes, play around, make mistakes and find out what works and what does not. Did I mention make mistakes?

It taught me that having duplicate content isn’t really so bad because I’ve made a lot of money off of the duplicate content. It also taught me that duplicate content isn’t so good because Google doesn’t seem to like sites that use too much of it. So, if my site is already in the Google crapper, what do I have to lose if I decide to try something new?

Hand Coding vs. Professional Coding

The interent is a moving target. Back when I originally coded the site, I coded it according to the rules and recommendations of the day. As the rules changed, I didn’t change the site accordingly. It was too big and cumbersome to go through all 300 plus pages to make the necessary changes. I found a few short cuts, but no short cut was short enough to recode the entire site.

Enter Joomla

Joomla, the wonderful open source tool, does all of the heavy lifting for me. Like WordPress, the programmers are always tweaking and improving the code to keep up with the latest developments on the web. Whether its security issues, SEO improvements or faster load time, the experts are doing what experts do. Therefore, I can do what I like to do, write, play around with graphics and figure out how to make money.

What I’ve Learned So Far

Large sites use content management systems. Suite, eHow, Bukisa, HubPages, and so on all use some type of content management system to manage their content. It’s the only way they can accept new writers, share revenue and keep track of what’s going on. Joomla has all the capabilities to run a large content site, manage multiple authors, share revenue and such. The possibilities are endless (check out a few sites that use Joomla).

The Joomla Transition

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been transitioning my site from the hand coded individual page website to a Joomla content management site. Changing the look of the site is as simple as downloading a new template (I’m still searching for one that’s right). Finding, modifying and deleting content is easily managed via the Administrative back end. Being able to upload new content using an interface similar to Suite’s  makes it much easier for me to add new content to the site. Who knows, maybe with new content Google might like me again.

Time Will Tell

Besides the ease of article management, maybe with professional coding my site might begin to see the light of day in when it comes to search engine rankings. Who knows? Only time will tell.