New host, new Drupal site...

I've been using Drupal and creating Drupal sites for clients for several years now, and I (finally!) decided it was time to convert my own web site to Drupal too. Like many other people I know in the web industry, I haven't necessarily made my own web site a priority. So, you may have noticed some glitches (broken links, bad text, etc.), but on the whole I think the move was a success.

The migration was mostly fairly straigtforward, involving the usual steps of setting up hosting, installing Drupal and modules, making a custom theme, and importing the content from the old site. A few "gotchas" and notes:

• I decided not to try to preserve URLs from the old site. So much of my content had to be edited to change the links. I used the Path Filter module so that I could make "internal" links, in case I need to move things again or change aliases.
• I had content in several WordPress installations. I used the Wordpress Import module to import the News section of my site, and that went pretty well.
• My personal blog was bilingual (English/Spanish), and that caused some issues. For one thing, I was using my Language Switcher plugin on that site, and it saved the English and Spanish versions of text together. Drupal splits them up. So I had to write my own importing module to handle that. And then I ran into a problem with character encoding -- the accented characters were not importing correctly. The solution (see article at that link) turned out to be to change each database field to a BLOB, change the database tables' encoding to UTF-8, and then change them back... well, I didn't really need to change them back, because I was just importing the tables from a copy of the database.
• I used the Context module to change the look of the site for the personal sections, since they've been incorporated into this main site now.
• I'm actually running three sites from the same Drupal installation (find out how on the official Drupal multi-site page, and be sure to read all the notes on sub-directories if you are using them!). First, there's the main site, which incorporates News (formerly in Wordpress), my personal pages (formerly static in a sub-directory), my personal blog (formerly in WordPress). Second, I have poplarclass.com, which describes a Drupal class I taught last year. And third, my high school class alumni site, which was previously a Drupal site in a sub-directory of my main web site.
• Since I am not sure how to implement it in Drupal yet, I left my bicycle trails site in WordPress for now -- it uses my Routes plugin.