English clergyman, John Donne once said, “No man is an island…” He may have been right then, but today, this one man (yes, that little construction worker above) is an island unto himself, rebuilding all of my web properties under my Netmix Media umbrella brick by brick. This entails converting all of my WordPress enabled web sites in a single, WordPress multisite network consisting of all the domains I operate. And, it involves exporting databases for each site and importing them into the multisite instance, moving all themes and plug-ins from each site into the new system, and then making sure all the media assets that are pulled over in the database transfer are properly linked.

I noticed that with my Netmix.com web site, a lot of the text content came over, but multimedia assets outside of the WordPress wp-content/uploads folder need to be fixed, as the links to these assets are broken. I also noticed that for every site that I employ NextGen Gallery, I’ve had to download the “gallery” folder from “wp-content” for each blog, and then recreate galleries in the new network. Unfortunately, no available plug-in exists to export NexGen galleries from a single site instance to a multi-site network. It has to be done manually. This, my friends, is a lot of work!

Many of the plug-ins I use for social media, like Twitter Tools or Intense Debate, need to be connected up correctly to each system. While multisite allows for a plug-in to be used across all the blogs in your network, each one has to be enabled with its own API key or login, to work correctly for each site. Nothing like publishing something here on TonyZeoli.com, and then have it appear on DigitalStrategyWorks, my digital strategy consulting company’s site.

Given my day job as Lead Developer at UNC Chapel Hill, this work has to take place nights and weekends. While I could put all the sites in maintenance mode to hide their various states, where some haven’t been updated with new content and others have layout issues, they don’t garner enough attention to justify shutting them down while I bring each one back to life.

At this point, I’m extremely busy with ensuring that we wind down Reese News web operations for a skeleton publishing staff, who will be contributing to the site for the summer. It will afford me the opportunity to migrate our media assets to a CDN, which should increase site performance and speed.

If you’re looking at this blog and wondering what the heck happened to my TonyZeoli.com publishing schedule, well, as you can see not much. My goal right now is not to publish to the blog, as much as it is to fix everything and get them all ready for the future. As each blog/site is updated, I’ll talk about those updates here. We can measure the progress together.

With that in mind, I’m working on revamping Netmix.com into a blog focused on web and mobile application design and development in the music industry. Other categories included education and careers, video, and the business of music as seen through the eyes of the individuals doing the work. It wont’ be so much a music news site, as it will be a blog with contributions from various players in most aspects of the music industry.

Thanks for stopping by and for cutting me some slack. I certainly need it!