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:
-
Multiple authors and clear attribution.
-
An editor suitable for technical and non-technical staff. (No markdown commuted to a git repo!)
-
A draft system to allow review and contribution before publishing.
-
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.
-
Created a new Publication on Medium named Abletech.
-
Setup a new custom domain for that Publication at
stories.abletech.nz. -
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!)
-
We left our old blog as is, and redirected the root path
blog.abletech.nzto 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>
