The Last Spinner

I just watched the last Spinner Of Death, or at least for Martinez CA UMC, anyway.

Emboldened by the success of my bud, AMR, I separated my Martinez CA UMC blog from all of the others, by moving it to my church email account. With the church email account now the only administrator, and the church blog the only blog owned by that account, migration was simple.

• I migrated the account.
• I migrated the blog.

Migrating the account was practically instantaneous. Migrating the blog took a few minutes, and included an animation that reminded me of the above mentioned spinner. I watched it with a few minutes of dread, anticipating filing a Blogger Help: Something Is Broken trouble report.

Having gone back to my other computer to get some work done, a few minutes later I was relieved to see

Welcome to the new Blogger beta.
Congratulations! Your move to the new Blogger is complete.

pop up in my GMail.

Since my Martinez CA UMC blog is (currently) not my most active blog, I was not too anxious to setup and test the template before the migration. I simply migrated, picked the Beta equivalent of the Classic template, and patched in a few custom objects.

I made a couple small improvements in the page layout, which should balance out a few small glitches which I found. The new page layout is cleaner in some places, and clunkier in others. I doubt that the current readership will notice anything, as this blog gets much less traffic than my tech blogs. Having gotten the migration out of the way, I am ready now to work on its contents, in preparation for the Christmas season. And later, I will plan the migration of the other blogs.

I won't so casually migrate my larger blogs; they have steady readers (several hundred daily). Having one of those blogs out of action for an hour or two (based upon their proportional sizes, against the results from my baseline test) would inconvenience more than a couple readers. Those blogs, and the account that owns them, I will migrate very deliberately. This blog, I migrated simply to test team blog migration, and to get an idea how long I might want to allow for one migration.

Note: The account used to execute the migration, as defined in this process, will become, under Beta, the permanent owner of the blog(s) migrated. Choose this account, if a choice is necessary, carefully. Consider the strategy below. Plan a team blog migration, carefully.

• Log all secondary administrator accounts out of Blogger.
• On your computer, close all browser windows except your single Blogger session.
• Migrate the account.
• Migrate one or more test blogs, if available.
• Migrate the blog.
• Pick the new template, or upload a tested template, if available.
• Patch in all custom features, and test.

The above procedure may seem anal, and some steps may be excessive, but I think it will go a long way toward reducing migration failures. Of course, YMMV.