Dear Congress, Last year I mismanaged my funds and this year I cannot decide on a budget. Until I have come to a unified decision that fits all of my needs and interests, I will have to shut down my checkbook and will no longer be able to pay my taxes. I’m sure you’ll understand. Thank you very much for setting an example we can all follow. Repost if you agree.

If you have been following inMessment specifically for the Freedom posts, please check out HistoricWords.com and you can follow there.

Moving the Freedom Category to the New Blog

It was a pretty big process for me to start HistoricWords.com. Here are the basic steps I went through:

Choose Domain Name

Choosing a domain name is always a hard task for me. I tried sever variations on “history” and “writing”. Then I would check if the names I came up with were available. The first choice I wanted, “WrittenHistory” is not a valid website but it is held by a domain auction site. They are willing to sell it to me but I am not ready to pay at this time. I came up with “HistoricWords” and now I like it better than my first idea. I was able to register it for $16 and I own it for a year.

Set Up WordPress

Next I had to Install WordPress and set up the theme for the new blog. I used a lot of what I had done with inMessment. At this point I use the Atahualpa Theme by BytesForAll. It has an Export/Import feature that allowed me to start with the same settings I have on inMessment. From there I adjusted the color scheme and sizing to fit the new vision I have for HistoricWords.com.

Exporting an Importing The Freedom Category Posts

WordPress has an Export feature that will export your blog to an XML file. Then you can import it to another WordPress site. It has filtering options that allowed me to export only the posts in the Freedom category. The export includes everything about the posts, including any comments, so when I imported them on the new blog they looked the way they did on inMessment.

Cleaning up the Messy Parts

The import process brings in all the categories and tags from the first site, so I had to delete the ones I did not want on the new site an make sure the posts were categorized and tagged the way I wanted them. This was a somewhat tedious process.

I also had a lot of links to the inMessment blog in the posts. I started going through them one-by-one and then I thought there must be a better way. I searched the WordPress Plugin site and found a plugin that will do Search & Replace. This allowed me to search through all the posts and replace links and other things that I wanted to change.

Add Redirects For The Moved Posts

One of the big things to worry about when moving posts from one blog to another is Google and other search engines. I was starting to get a lot of search engine traffic for the Freedom posts. I did not want to loose these searches. The way to handle this is to create a “301 Redirect” for each post. A 301 Redirect does two things, it redirect the old URL to a new URL and it notifies the user that the URL has been permanently change. Google and other search engines will take 301 Redirect and update their indexes.

I found another WordPress Plugin called Redirection which does exactly this. I started creating a single redirect for each post and again I thought, there must be a better way. After a little thought, I recategorized each post from Freedom to “Redirect to HistoricWords”. Then I was able to use the regular expression feature (really geeky stuff) of the Redirection Plugin to redirect any post in that category to the new blog. Then all I had to do was change the category on each post and the redirects were done.

There are lots of other tweaks and I am sure I will come across other issues, but those are the major steps I went through. Check out HistoricWords.com and let me know what you think.

Here is the About section from http://www.iwantyourmoney.net/:

Two versions of the American dream now stand in sharp contrast. One views the money you earned as yours and best allocated by you. It champions the traditional American dream, which has played out millions of times through generations of Americans, of improving one’s lot in life and the entrepreneurial spirit of daring to dream and to build big. The other believes that the federal government, using taxpayers’ money, should play a major role in leveling out the nation’s wealth to guarantee outcomes to all, regardless of effort. How America chooses between these two views of the role of government, at this crucial juncture, will have everything to do with the future we and our children and our children’s children will enjoy.

President Barack Obama clearly believes in the larger government view. In his Inaugural Address, he said, “Now there are some who question the scale of our ambitions – who suggest our system cannot tolerate big plans…The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.” With a federal deficit of nearly one and a half trillion dollars for 2009 and deficit projections of not less than a half a trillion dollars over the next ten years, the question of whether government is too big or too small is very relevant, even vital to the future of the nation.

Join filmmaker Ray Griggs in this documentary film I Want Your Money as he contrasts the two paths the United States can take using the words and actions of Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. The film uses interviews from well-known public figures, experts, movie clips, dramatic portrayals, music, graphics and even comedic animation to tell the story in the plainest terms of the choice between the Obama and the Reagan views of the role of the federal government in our society. It also examines how these big government programs have been tried in the past at great moral and financial cost to the nation. California is offered as a case-in-point in understanding what economic challenges might face the nation, if we choose the larger government path. Finally, I Want Your Money is a call to action for those who care about the future of the United States.