So, the transfer process from my old host to this new one (Bluehost) is complete, and I took the opportunity to basically build this blog up from the ground again. With the amount of plugins I tested over the last 18 months, there was an awful lot of clutter left in the SQL tables, and I had experienced problems with the old host and their security updates. During the process of exporting the posts from the old home of the blog to this one (more on that later), I ended up losing the post numbers; where this post might have previously been something like http://www.chrismerriman.com/index.php/archives/2023 , it would now be ……/1926 .
As this meant that any deep links to specific posts from external sites were lost (and the number shift was not purely sequential, so no fancy redirect equations would work), I decided to change the fancy permalink strategy, hence this post can now be found at https://chrismerriman.com/blog-vamp-completed . This makes addresses a little more memorable, and possibly could improve this site’s standings with the search engines (once the bots have completed crawling around, finding the old content under it’s new addresses.)
Back to the export/import process. Ideally, I would have done this properly, but part of the reason for me moving hosts was that I was again unable to access the backend of this site – the admin section of wordpress. Without access to my plugins, I was unable to take a proper backup of the existing posts, comments, pages etc. Luckily, I had an 8 day old XML file that I’d exported as a temporary backup. However, I hit an unforseen snag when I attempted to import that file into this site – it was over 2Mb, and therefore exceeded the PHP restrictions in place. Rather than wait around for tech. support to confirm if they’d be willing to, at least temporarily, relax the limits, I decided to delve into the XML file and see what could be done. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find 2.7Mb of data to drop, so I decided to try an experiment. Checking through the structure of the file, I kept the beginning and end of the file, then removed around 2/3 of the posts and comments. Saving the resulting file, this imported fine; I then kept the same empty structure, and inserted the middle 1/3 of posts & comments, to my surprise this then imported fine without wiping anything out from the previous import, and then the last 1/3 went in fine. Basically, I kept all the content bar a week or two, and I luckily still had the old site open in a different tab, so just needed to copy’n’paste that into new posts.
I decided to try a new theme for the blog, and also drastically cut down on the plugins installed, hoping it would speed up page load times, especially for first time visitors to this site. This seems to have worked reasonably well, and I repeated the process for this site’s brother blog (test.chrismerriman.com).
I’ve also completed some work on John’s new site, and started the process of converting my old niche article sites into blogs as well, but more on that later.
Jan 29 2008
Blog Revamp Completed
Dec 30 2007
Enough Of The Intro, Onto The Main Content
OK, first things first, if you are reading this blog, you have either decided to visit Kazakhstan, or are at least considering the possibility.
You SHOULD go to Google, or your favourite search engine, and do a little research beforehand, especially if this will be your first trip. This blog are pretty much just random thoughts, as they occur to me, rather than an attempt at a comprehensive guide to this interesting country.
There will be some things posted here, that you may disagree with, once you have visited Kzk. Fair enough, I’m not touting this text as anything other than my own personal view of life over here.
There may be some factual errors, or facts simply presented a little too simplistically, or without any polite ‘fluff’ around.
All info typed here has been collated from personal experience, if you want solid facts, I suggest something like the CIA’s page on Kazakhstan.
Anyway, enough of the preliminary blurb, onto the meat of the matter:
Things that may grab your attention whilst you’re over here:
Men nearly always shake hands upon meeting one another, even more so if it is the first time you’ve met. Women don’t. If they are family, there may be a peck on the cheek, or a quick embrace. This area is still a little fuzzy to me, so I just stand back and accept whatever comes my way :>
That is all I’m posting for today, will try and post some more tomorrow – better to learn to walk before I try sprinting. OK, well jogging maybe…
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Dec 05 2007
64 Visitors Away From 30,000 !
This blog has been running since July 2006, and has seen a few changes since then. Originally it was intended to be used for keeping in touch with my friends and family back in Britain, and also to link to some articles on my niche sites. Since then it has grown in different directions, and I now find a lot of traffic arrives from the search engines, rather than just people I know checking in. Since August, the site has received more than 3000 visitors a month, though despite the general upward trend of visitor numbers, the Alexa rank is still getting worse. I suppose other sites are improving their visitor stats by a larger margin…
Nov 26 2007
A Month Of Random Contacts…
During the last month or so, I have been contacted by a number of people, all related to Kazakhstan strangely enough. First we had someone who has built a plane and called it Berkut (which is also the name of a vodka over here), an English guy moving to Astana who wanted some more information about satellite TV and supermarkets, an Australian guy who is moving here in December, with his Russian wife, and finally an Indian (apologies if incorrect, his surname sounds Hindu to me) architect, living in New York who designed the local Cinema City complex (he wanted some photos of it, as his current ones weren’t too good).
I’m hopefully passing the vodka on to an American friend, so the plane builder can celebrate the flight with a suitably named drink, we’re looking forward to meeting some new faces here in Astana at some point, and the architect has been put in touch with Tom, who has better camera skills than me, so should have some better shots than those captured last night at Tiflis.
Anyway, they all made contact through finding this blog, so a big thanks to the search engines out there who are spidering away 🙂
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Sep 18 2007
Search Engine Results
I have just completed a quick check of how this blog is faring when it comes to search engine results, using Google.
www.ChrisMerriman.com is 3rd for the phrase Kazakhstan Blog, an improvement most probably helped by a recent campaign I ran over at PayPerPost. Unfortunately if you search for Astana Blog , this blog is now just 17th, possibly due to the fact that I don’t mention my home town each time it appears in a blog post – long term readers know where I live, but search engine bots (and new readers now that I think about it 🙂 ) may not be able to figure that out. Though it is mentioned at the top of each page ().
Finally, if you happen to search for Astana Kazakhstan Blog (or the more likely search of Astana, Kazakhstan Blog), then this site comes in at 1st place!
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Sep 12 2007
Google Earth Software Updated
As you may remember, I have been using Google Earth to help plan out some of the upcoming Amsterdam trip – there is no point in deciding to visit four museums in one day, if they are all miles from each other, for example. Anyway, thanks to a kind forum member over at www.channels.nl, I was informed of an update Google have made. Apart from a number of background tweaks, if you now press Ctrl+Alt+A, you can slip into a basic flight simulation mode, and take off from a few different airports around the world. The ability to easily ‘fly’ around areas certainly brings a new perspective to looking at out planet, though without an analogue controller of some description, you may well find it difficult to be very accurate with your headings. I’ve yet to try my steering wheel & pedals combo…
On a similar note, the BBC have published an article on fresh satellite data being used in conjunction with Google Earth in an attempt to find the missing Steve Fossett. If you don’t know who he is, stick his name in as a search term at your favourite search engine – his achievements are pretty impressive. Anyway, people are now looking for a 30 by 20 pixel blob on maps around the area his plane could have gone down, though the American military has thumbed their noses at the idea, scoffing at the idea that civilian satellite imagery is good enough to detect such a small presence.
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Sep 08 2007
BIG Thanks To Visitors To This Blog
Last month you broke the 3000 real unique visitors (not including search engine bots etc.) in one month barrier for the first time in this blog’s history. Just wanted to say thank you. My next target is to try and get my Alexa rank below 300,000. I was close for a while in July, but it has since shot up again (that is the wrong direction)…
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Aug 27 2007
Busy Day
Today I decided to finally get around to catching up with all the background work on this blog. That meant going through my plugins one at a time, upgrading them to the most recent version, and then checking nothing had been broken by this process. Readers of this blog should not notice any difference really, other than a few tweaks here and there, as well a small increase in speed of loading. Sadly, my collection of King plugins have not yet been updated to work with WP2.2.x, so this blog will remain at 2.1.3 until I find an alternative, or someone comes up with a viable and easily implemented hack – too much of this site’s design relies on me being easily able to display certain widgets on certain pages, and blocking them on others.
Luckily there are only a few days left in this month, as I have just broken the 2Gb mark on bandwidth, for the first time; this blog is limited to 2.5Gb/month, so as long as I don’t receive a sudden rush of visitors, and the search engine spiders don’t all suddenly decide to crawl the site 24/7, all should be fine. When this site was started a little over a year ago, I had a limit of 250Mb per month, and apart from when I hosted videos (I now use YouTube), I didn’t often get close to the limit…
I have also updated the listing of all the search terms this site is/was #1 for on Google. If such facts interest you, then click on the I Got Lucky link at the top of each page. I’ve also tried to re-order them into basic groups by subject, rather than just sticking the newest results in at the bottom.
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Aug 08 2007
Recategorization Half Completed
As I previously mentioned, the blog was undergoing some work yesterday. Now that stage has been completed, I am working through all the posts, month by month, and re-categorizing those that easily fall into one of the new niches I have created. This has obviously led to a lengthening of the list of categories on the left here, and if anyone is searching for a post, you will currently notice that posts made before April this year are still to be worked on. I hope to eventually get all the work done, and perhaps encourage a little more traffic from search engines etc, as less posts will simply be labelled as Personal or Interesting – not really the most descriptive of titles, apologies to those that have put up with it for so long.
PS I am pretty sure there will be some further minor tweaking done over the coming weeks, as categories may be merged/split or simply renamed; however nothing as drastic as the work last night will be carried out, so visitors should not notice any loss in speed of the site being served to them.
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Jul 27 2007
Trip Planned
Unfortunately, ChrisD is not able to make it over to Kazakhstan this year. On the plus side, I am meeting him in Amsterdam for a few days of relaxation, and then travelling onto Britain to see family and friends. (My brother’s birthday is something I was hoping to get back to the UK for, and now it is sorted 🙂 .) Unfortunately Irina does not have enough holiday left to come as well, but we will all be back in Britain around Christmas time.
Anyway, my travel details are as follows :-
Leaving Astana 21st September 08:50
Arrive Kaliningrad 21st September 11:00
Leave Kaliningrad 21st September 12:50
Arrive Amsterdam 21st September 13:55
Spend 3 nights in Amsterdam, at an apartment with a view of the canal, that belongs to the Hotel Amstelzicht.
Then on to Britain…
Leave Amsterdam 24th September 18:20
Arrive Birmingham 24th September 18:40
3 and a bit weeks in Britain to say hello to family and friends. Hopefully fit in Evesham and Cheltenham, then Swansea (well Clydach actually), then down to Falmouth for my bro’s birthday.
Then…
Leave Birmingham 16th October 06:25
Arrive Schipol 16th October 08:50
Leave Schipol 16th October 16:15
Arrive Kaliningrad 16th October 19:15
Leave Kaliningrad 16th October 21:35
Arrive Astana 17th October 05:15
(All times are local)
I am going to miss Ira like crazy, but I am looking forward to the break immensely, and it will be really good to see Nick, Mum, John, Dad, Jan and some Cheltenham friends as well.
Pink Badger
Why that random phrase? One of the main reasons I am posting this flight information is so that if family want to know the details, or I am not at home, I or they can just search for a unique (I’m pretty sure I did not include it anywhere else 😉 ) phrase on this blog, and know they have the right post immediately.
You never know, perhaps pink badger is also a popular search engine search term, and I will increase this site’s traffic…. Not too likely though.
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