Blog Post transfer in progress

The site is 100% complete with regard to functionality, but we are still in the process of transferring the existing blog posts from the old site to the new site, manually, one post at a time. You would think that in this age of "high technology", one could find a tool that would be able to handle bulk transfer of one database to another; in certain, and indeed in most cases, this is easily done, but in this particular case, we were dealing with two very dissimilar database schemas, as well as physical and logical data construction that was too far out of sync. The old site was built using ColdFusion, PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is fairly normal (except for the ColdFusion), but the killer was the way that the database was scructured, and the use of MS SQL. This created a very difficult situation when it came to the point of what should have been an easy transfer to the new platform and database structure, which is MySQL and the other languages, etc. After trying three different widely accepted tools to package up and process the batch transfer, and as a result meeting with three different colossal failure events, it was decided to proceed with a manual transfer. We had already used this same approach in transferring all of the books for a similar reason. As it turns out, this was an extreme blessing, because the existing MS SQL database was frought with the results of an insecure site structure that allowed for massive database spamming, and insertion of malicious code, intended to benefit hackers. The obvious blessing here is that we are now truly starting over with a brand new, clean, and healthy foundation, stripped of all previous errors.

While this is taking some time, we have several people working on the individual post transfers. It is our hope to have it complete in the month of September, at which point we will permanently shut down the old site, applying all of the search engine redirects necessary to make sure all search values are transferred to the new site.