Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

I’m staring at my computer screen waiting for DNS to propagate. That’s when the Internet servers are all notified of a new website. But it takes time, 4-8 hours maybe, sometimes up to 72 hours. This is only step 2 of the transition imposed on some Blogger.com blogs including this one. We have to “migrate” to Google’s servers by May 1. Ok, I’m migrating.

Trouble is, how long to wait before deciding it isn’t working? I’ve already gone through one of my two bags of M&Ms.

I checked with some who did this earlier. It seems to be a tough slog for most, with some reporting loss of 10-25% of their readership in the process. Others had no trouble. Or maybe they didn’t notice.

So much has to work – keeping the old posts and maintaining links to them, making sure everything looks the same, making sure the email subs and RSS feed works properly—and still, readers can be lost. I’m not sure how that happens, but it seems I’m about to find out.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 4/28/2010 05:32:00 PM