Resource | Migrating to Medium from Tumblr

Migrating to Medium from Tumblr

At Abletech we have been sharing our thoughts on our blog for a number of years. Recently, we have wanted to lower the barrier for our staff to contribute their knowledge back into the community. In short, our single-user Tumblr account was just not doing it for us.

We wanted our new blog to have these four features:

  1. Multiple authors and clear attribution.

  2. An editor suitable for technical and non-technical staff. (No markdown commuted to a git repo!)

  3. A draft system to allow review and contribution before publishing.

  4. Hosted under our abletech.nz domain.

Medium gives all of the above, and has some additional benefits:

  • Stories seeded to other Medium readers.

  • Cutting edge platform (Abletech’ers will desire to be good writers).

  • Mobile app (good for uploading photos and creating drafts that we can then refine/collaborate on).

  • No designer/developer time spent on maintenance.

Drawbacks:

  • Less flexibility on how we want the blog to look.

Seemed a nice fit.

Packing up and moving on

The biggest challenge to shifting a blog is the content. Unless the URL of each post remains the same, you can expect to see 404s when your readers find an old link and click through. Not a good look. So here is what we did.

  1. Created a new Publication on Medium named Abletech.

  2. Setup a new custom domain for that Publication at stories.abletech.nz.

  3. Imported some recent stories using the fantastic Medium importing tool. (Which even keeps Google happy by adding the source it is importing from as the canonical link automatically!)

  4. We left our old blog as is, and redirected the root pathblog.abletech.nz to our new blog (stories.abletech.nz) using a Javascript redirect, which only fires on the root path /. Doing this with Javascript is ok according to Google provided it doesn’t trick the user into viewing content they were not expecting. Ideally we could have done this with a Webserver (Apache etc.) but because it’s hosted on Tumblr, we didn’t have that level of control.

Job done. New blog works a treat. Old blog archives still accessible. No 404s hanging around the internet. Team happy and contributing!

P.S. The Javascript redirect code I placed in our old Tumblr theme looks like this:

<script>
  // Check if this is the root of the domain. I.e. blog.abletech.nz
  // If it is, then redirect to the new blog domain
  if (window.location.href == window.location.protocol + "//" + window.location.hostname + "/") {
    window.location = "[https://stories.abletech.nz](https://stories.abletech.nz)";
  }
</script>
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