Us birds like to stick together.
When we heard the plight of Dave the Social Penguin, the Canary had to come to the rescue. Not that Dave needed rescuing as such, he just needed expert help to move out of his rented accommodation, and into a nest of his own.
You see, Dave was using WordPress.com, the free-for-all blogging tool that millions of other bloggers use, but while it is a brilliant product, Dave wanted to move the furniture around, put up some posters and generally just make a nicer home for himself.
He loved the flexibility of WordPress.com, and he knew that successful bloggers often move on to the mighty .ORG version where you own your own site, tweak your own code, and generally have complete control. So we set up Dave with a brand-new, self-hosted blogging platform, all built on the same awesome content management system he was used to.
Dave is the alter ego of Mike McGrail, a respected and recognised social media advocate. He is one of those experts who don’t call themselves experts, which means he is one.
His site is a simple, clean, variation on one of our favourite premium WordPress templates, Magazine from Genesis. But by going with the self-hosted option, he now has more flexibility to expand and monetise his popular blog. The limitations of the old system wouldn’t have allowed that.
Mike’s specification was to transition his site from one platform to another without any disruption in service. One of his key requirements was not to kill any search engine links that he has built over the last two years of blogging, and so we carefully exported all his content out of the old and into the new. We also switched him onto a new Disqus commenting system on the way.
Mike said: “Canary Dwarf easily understood the needs of The Social Penguin Blog and made them happen. The level of service was superb, no request was too big and no question too stupid!”
We wish Dave (and Mike) well in their new home.
