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How to Migrate Your Blogs from WordPress.com to WordPress Multisite on Pair Networks VPS

UPDATE – April 9, 2012:  The Boles Blogs Network is now back on WordPress.com!  We will write another article explaining the why and how of moving back.  We’re leaving this article online because it might benefit someone else seeking to export their WP.com blog to a standalone WordPress installation.

Welcome to my first new article since the Boles Blogs Network had to leave our hosting setup on WordPress.com because of a strange billing anomaly that threatened the viability of our publishing network core.

Here’s what happened…

Two years ago, when I moved my blogs from a self-hosted Movable Type installation over to WordPress.com, I had the expert help of Automattic employee Lloyd Dewolf (Budd) — who is no longer with the company — to get all my thousands of posts imported into WordPress.com blogs.  As a blogs-warming gift, Lloyd waived the fee for domain mapping for the first year for all my imported blogs.  We added a few other blogs during that first year, and I paid the domain mapping fees.

A year passed.

I paid for another year of domain mapping upgrades for all 14 blogs.

Another year passed.

I am now unable to renew, and pay for, my domain mapping upgrades as you can see in the screenshot below.  There was a major “Upgrade” to the way WordPress.com now handles their shopping cart that somehow broke my ability to pay my way on the service. Notice there’s no “Renew Now” button for me to click for BolesBlues.com?  The domain mapping says it was purchased by “wpcomvip” and not me and that’s a problem.

Continue reading → How to Migrate Your Blogs from WordPress.com to WordPress Multisite on Pair Networks VPS

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How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.

One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!  Here’s why:

Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article.  Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions.  However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.

Continue reading → How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

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The 2012 State of the Boles Blogs Network

As we move forward into 2012 — I always prefer to look ahead than over my shoulder — it’s time to determine where we’re going and how we plan to stay on that path in publishing 14 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network.  Here’s the full list of the blogs we tend to every single day for you:

Urban Semiotic
WordPunk
Boles University Blog
Boles Blues
Panopticonic
RelationShaping
Memeingful
10txt
Scientific Aesthetic
GO INSIDE Magazine
Dramatic Medicine
Carceral Nation
Celebrity Semiotic
The United Stage of America

Continue reading → The 2012 State of the Boles Blogs Network

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Creating a Publication Network with Google+ Pages

Yesterday, Google finally made Google+ Pages available to the masses.  I immediately logged in and started creating pages for all the web properties I own, and I’ll tell you why I decided to spend an afternoon clicking and linking on Google+.

Continue reading → Creating a Publication Network with Google+ Pages

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Thoughts on Writing Prompts

In the summer of 1991, I attended a camp for artistic expression of all sorts — I had applied and entered for writing and so I took a number of different writing courses of the creative variety. One of the things that we did nearly every day was to work with different writing prompts to inspire our writing. On one morning we were handed photos from magazines (one each) and on another day we were instructed to go outside and just write based on on what we saw out there. There was even one morning when one of the professors simply said, “Thirty seconds — write!” That didn’t seem like so much of a proper writing prompt as much as it was a direct order from our commander!

Continue reading → Thoughts on Writing Prompts