This past week, I noticed a problem with my blog.  I was looking at an older post and the photos weren’t showing up.  I’ve been working to correct this all week and I almost have it done.  What happened?  Read on.

In early 2009, I wasn’t happy with the flexibility and customization provided by Google’s Blogger service, so I decided to move my blog to my own web server and use WordPress.  I won’t get into a debate here about the relative merits of the two platforms – you can find too much info about that on the web.  Suffice it to say that after more than a year of use, I’m very happy with WordPress, it’s useability, flexibility, and how easy it is to customize.  I don’t regret my decision to move at all.

However, this particular problem has been a bear to fix.  When I switched to WordPress, I used one of its features to import all of the posts from my old blog into my new one.  This worked very well and made the switch mostly painless.  I guess I should have known that was too good to be true.

The import process of course imported all of the links to photos within the existing posts.  But the links point to the original location – on Blogspot.  At the time, I realized this and since everything displayed correctly, I just accepted it and moved on.  Over a year later, it turns out that the source of my problem with missing photos is that some of those links no longer work.  So I only postponed the work – I didn’t avoid it.

What I’ve been doing intermittently over the past week is going back through all of my older posts and changing all of the links that point to Blogspot.  For photos, I can point to copies on my server or on Flickr.  But sometimes, I don’t have a photo anywhere but on Blogspot and in those cased I have to upload the photo as well as change the link.  One thing that’s been really helpful is the search function within WordPress.  I can easily search for “blogspot” in all of my posts and know which ones I still have to work on.

This is a fairly straightforward problem and solution.  It just takes some time to fix.  And it also points out that having control of web content used in your blog posts is important.  If you’re switching to WordPress, it’s something to be aware of.

I apologize if this has been a problem for you.  I should have everything corrected later today, and if you notice any lingering issues in the future, please let me know.