[Advanced] So you're planning to launch a new blog but don't want to reveal it to anyone quite yet, for a variety of reasons. You want to be able to view individual posts as they would normally appear, but neither want them indexed nor visible to anyone. Or you want to test some themes on an existing blog without your visitors having to see.

There are a few ways to accomplish either, and it's relatively easy. Just make sure you take precautions to back up your existing blog and database. (I've wiped out a few sites. Fortunately, they never had more than about 9 posts, and could be fixed manually.)

Subdomain Method for Existing Blogs

This method is useful for testing changes to a blog that already exists. It amounts to creating a test blog on a subdomain. Your hosting account must allow you to not only set up a subdomain for your, but also access the existing database. You should know that many hosts do not allow this. And as I've only tested on WordPress this method may not work for you on other blog platforms.

1. Create a subdomain. So if your blog is at http://www.myblogdomain.com/, then create something like test.myblogdomain.com. You'll need to do this in your hosting control panel, not your blog platform control panel.
2. Install your blog platform on the subdomain. If you have "one-click" blog setup through your host, just make sure that you specify the subdomain during installation, else you may wipe out your existing blog.
3. Tweak the test blog's configuration to access the real blog's database. If your hosting provider does not allow this, you will need to backup the main database and import into the test database.
4. Turn off access to your test blog to search engine bots. Newer versions of WordPress have a "privacy" setting. For older versions, look under the "Writing" options of "Options" and get rid of the entries in the "Update Services" section that "ping" one or more blog pinging services. For other blog platforms, you will have to look for something similar.
5. Make your changes and test them. No one will know that the test blog exists, provide you don't click on any links to either the main blog nor outside your domain. Also make sure not to change the database or you may affect the main blog. (That is, if the test blog is accessing the original database.)
6. When you're done, just get rid of the test blog and apply changes to the main blog, if desired. Just make sure you don't get over-zealous and delete the wrong database. [I would highly recommend backing up the main blog's database before starting this process.]

This method is good for when you have an existing blog and want to test a few themes and plugins before going live. But what if you want to launch a new blog and don't want anyone to see any of the content until you're done tweaking?

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Are you planning to port (move) your blog between blogging platforms. It's no easy task under certain circumstances. Eric Giguere offers some great general tips for moving your blog.

I have a large port of seven sites from Typepad to WordPress that I've been putting off since last December. WordPress to WordPress is relatively easy, even between versions. However, between platforms often means a change in URL/permalink structure. In this case, I cannot just add WordPress to the existing hosting because of how Typepad works - AFAIK. So the blogs have to move to new servers.

I'll catalog each step in the process, and will post some tips here when I'm finally done. I'm hoping to also offer a couple of free web-based tools that will help generate the necessary URL redirect rules for your .htaccess file. That means no ridiculous manual tweaks. That's handy when you have several hundred blog posts.

If you cannot wait for my tools, however, here's a general algorithm for redirecting your URLs (note that I'm leaving out a lot of technical details):

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