WordPress.com and domains

So apparently it’s not that simple to get out from under the thumb of WordPress.com.

I want to use a custom domain name and my own hosting instead of onlydarksets.wordpress.com, but I would like to retain my Google/Yahoo/Live search rankings. I had hoped throwing a little cash at it would do the trick, but apparently all that gets you is 302 redirects, which are “temporary” redirects.  In common parlance, that tells the browser how to get to the page, but it does not tell the search engine spiders to update your URLs.  So, Google will continue to think that onlydarksets.wordpress.com contains all of my existing posts.

WordPress.com suggests simply paying them $10/year for life to redirect the old links to my new site.  After thinking a little more about why I was doing this, I’m thinking $10/year ain’t a bad proposition.

The good news is that, from this point on, the search engines will use onlydarkets.com for new posts.

Migrating from hosted WordPress.com to your own server

The problem is that you lose all of your search indexing if you just export it and start at your own domain.  However, here is a good writeup on the steps to avoid that.  It’s pretty simple if you’re willing to spend $10.

Basically, you buy a domain and host it through WordPress.com for a while, and then you setup your own server.  Doing it this way, WordPress.com will forward all of the requests to the old site in a way that search engines update their index with the new URL.  We’ll see how it works!

Speeding up album art display for SageTV extenders

On my SageTV HD-100, it was taking 3-5 seconds to scroll through each page of videos or music.  Turns out there are three things required to fix this:

1. Turn on hardware caching in sage.properties (enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true)
2. Reduce the User Input Timeout (Settings | Customize | Inactivity Timeout and OSD AutoHide | Configure)
3. Enable album art caching (SageMC | Enhancements | Cache Album Art)

Now it’s smooth as silk.