Merging Two Blogs

Two blogs merging–Lessons and Lessons with Ridge Haven Homestead

Well, Fine Readers!

I’ve been pondering this change for some time, and have decided to take the plunge. I am, and have pretty much accomplished merging two blogs!

Why Merge Two Blogs?

As I began my blogging journey in the self-hosted world, I believed that it would be best to keep my main interests separate–homesteading seemed like plenty to focus on, and homeschooling seemed like enough to pursue on my original blog.

However, as I’ve been blogging for a couple of months with our Ridge Haven site, plus blogging with Lessons and Lessons (my homeschool blog), I often find myself in a quandary as to which blog to write which content for. Life on the homestead includes home education, so eventually, I realized that it would make more sense to just combine.  So, that means that I am merging two blogs together to make one super-blog!

Combining Homeschooling & Homesteading

Nature, wild edibles, even some of our homeschooling and homesteading activities are similar and overlap. Since we are (sort of–we are kind of on temporary hold) building, that has become a natural part of our home education, because it’s great hands-on, real-life learning.

More about that on my post on Apprenticeship, and a different post about “You Might be a Homesteading Homeschooler“

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I have had a hard time deciding if I talk about nature, does it go better with homesteading and the lifestyle that we are following, or does it go better with home education? See what I mean?

Got Overlap?  Why not merge?

I have had to conclude that home educating and homesteading are not tidy boxes. You just live your life. When we homeschool we are often very much involved with our homestead project.

Cleaning My Blog House

Therefore…what previously you could find on Lessons and Lessons, you will now find here!  Yay!  I will be working in the next week on tidying up my categories from the home educating blog to fit better into the present menu structure. I’d gotten a little informal with my categories and created a bunch!

The Process of Merging Two Blogs

If you’re curious what process I used for combining, or merging two blogs, it’s all laid out very nicely here.  Note that I moved the content from a self-hosted site to another self-hosted site.  I don’t really think that it matters, whether it’s self-hosted or WordPress hosted.  The process is the same.  

I followed these instructions, and they did not work for me at first. No clue why. In fact, I really prayed about combining/merging these two blogs; I had peace about doing it, so why didn’t it work? I still don’t know.

I tried several times last week to go through the export WordPress site and then import file into my new blog with no success. Absolutely nothing happened.

I began to wonder if maybe my answer to prayer was that I should not go forward with merging two blogs. Yet, I still believed and logic told me that it would be wise.

Just Do It

Today, I made up my mind that I would seek out some help from a computer guru. I’d find one somewhere. But, I did have an impression to try one more time before I got into paying someone to help me.

So I made a quick attempt. The file looked exactly the same that I needed to import/export, but for some reason, my new posts came over–a very nice surprise.

The process of merging my two blogs was not flawless.  My media files did not come over. But so far as I can see so far, all of the pictures from my posts are good. I did try step four on that tutorial I mentioned–about moving your media files. I honestly couldn’t log into my FTP server in FileZilla, so I gave up. I’ll deal with that if it becomes a problem, but I don’t see it being an issue.

Update:  when I have looked closer at the posts that I brought over, I see that none of my Featured Images came.  None of my media files came at all, but somehow within the posts, the images stayed intact.  So…that left me hunting all of those photos down and manually entering them into each post again.  Kind of a pain, but I got it done.  

Merging Two Blogs–It Gets Technical

Because of inability to log into the FileZilla, I used a plugin to do the old site redirect. I used the Simple Redirect plugin, and it seriously was super simple. I highly recommend it. I don’t get any bonus for saying that. But this creates an automatic redirect on my Lessons site–so if anyone tries to go there, it just brings them right here instead. It was way easier than trying to fiddle with code that I am so good at messing up!

How did I end up Here?

So, if you’re a person who got plopped into the middle of this blog and wondered how you got here, that’s how.  You may have signed up for my Lessons and Lessons blog, and got redirected here.  

I hope you’ll consider following us at this site. I will still be writing content on home educating, along with homesteading and everything that that entails. See my category menu to find out what topics we focus on.

For me, this feels a bit freeing.  I can focus on one blog, not two, and work on making it great.  My husband told me to do that from the beginning, but, I always think that I will be the exception to the rule.  Not so.  Better to not over-extend myself, and just keep my focus clear.  Lesson here?  Listen to a wise husband.  

Lesson to take-away

The take-away from this whole post is, if merging two blogs is something that you’re thinking about, it id definitely possible to do.  It’s not really that hard, but you can run into some little (or big) glitches along the way.  I feel that I made it through pretty well.  

Stay tuned!

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