I started blogging at SQLBlog.com in December of 2006. This past year, after a long and successful run, Adam Machanic – a founder of SQLBlog.com and the brain behind T-SQL Tuesday – reached out to me and suggested I migrate my content to a new home. It took me a while to bite the bullet and do it, but here we are.

It was a non-trivial amount of work. Huge shout-out to Adam (who, similarly, moved his SQLBlog content over to DataEducation.com). He provided some fantastic code in a little application that helped me create new posts on the new site, move the comments over and, at the end, put pointers up on every post to guide people here.

I tried to make the design minimal, and originally paid some homage back to the old site. Big thanks to Andy Mallon for helping me sanity check to get it to be quasi-presentable. I'm not quite happy with it yet, but it's getting there.

You should update your links and bookmarks, in case the old site might ever go down, the content moves, or DNS gets changed. I went out of my way to make it super easy to fix; you can just change sqlblog.com to sqlblog.org. That's it! The eventual URL is a lot tidier, and you are welcome to update to the shorter URL where you ultimately end up, but the simple TLD swap should work without issue. (Let me know if you have a link that doesn't work.)

I updated all of the Connect URLs to go to the WayBack Machine, since it's not clear how long that content will survive there, either. However this is not flawless – the old form of URLs that used ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=n were not always reliably captured by the WayBack Machine, so… damned if I do, damned if I don't.

In any case, it sounds like a lot of work was done, but I still have a lot of work to do.

• I need to go through and update all the categories (I used tags on the old site, but those didn't come over in the migration). I started doing this but haven't gotten very far yet.
• There are some serious formatting issues, mostly due to all the kludges I had to use in Community Server just to get things to look half-decent. I used a lot of blockquotes and inline styles (with !important) over there, since there was no global CSS functionality available. Fixing those is a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. If you see something really bad, please let me know.
• Some posts have broken images. Long story short: I sometimes found it easier to host images on my own personal site instead of uploading them to Community Server, and my old domain aaronbertrand.com got swiped from me by scum-of-the-earth, domain-squatting jerks. So the images themselves are long gone.
• There are still a lot of links that point to other bloggers' content on SQLBlog.com, and I don't know if there will be an easy way to identify and update all of those that have (or will have) moved their content elsewhere. If you find stale links, again, please let me know and I will try to correct them.
• I am going to redirect all the individual blog posts that detail service packs and cumulative updates for SQL Server 2012 and 2014 to the builds posts I maintain over on SQLPerformance.com. I may compile the set of 2008 and 2008 R2 ones, but I kind of doubt it, since the value of doing that declines a little bit each day.
• And I am still contemplating whether to ditch all the comments, just to avoid any doubts about GDPR.

I'm not sure quite how much new content will pop up here. My main goal was to have a little more control over the content and make sure it lives on for everyone who still finds it useful. Please be patient as I polish up the remaining bits.

First, I need to go update the links in all my blog posts on other sites and my answers on Stack Exchange; see you in a few weeks…