Sliwinski.com blog redirects to here now - I am Michael DOT Team

Ever since I set up this new site I wanted to migrate all of the content from my previous personal blog to here. Finally it’s done. All blog posts from way back in 2008 to today are migrated, reviewed and tagged and available for you and me to enjoy. Boy, it was a long and time-intensive journey and here’s how it went down:

I love the web and I want the links to be there forever
My blog has evolved over the years dramatically: domains, blog engines, hosts…
Migration using Siri Shortcuts on the iPad
Only place on the Internet? Not quite…
Here’s to the future of Michael DOT team!

I love the web and I want the links to be there forever

In today’s world of fast-scrolling social media, we’re used to the moment of now. We share our thoughts quickly and then forget about them. Even if you wrote something brilliant a month ago, good luck finding that post on your Facebook timeline later. That’s why I’ve always cared about having my own personal blog, where I control the content, the links to it and I can easily refer to them later. I’m old-school this way.

Want to see how my home office evolved over the years? Check out the “office” tag.
Want to see all my productivity video shows? Check out “Productive! Show” tag.
Curious about the development of the Productive! Magazine? Here’s the entire timeline.
Want to trace my Nozbe stories? It’s all here.
Which trends from a decade ago are still relevant today? Just check the best posts of 2012
I can keep going like this all day…

I love it this way. Every post has a link that works, will work and has been working until now. And from today on, every old link from sliwinski.com/LINK will redirect to michael.team/LINK.

However, it wasn’t just a change of a domain name but also the whole blogging engine which I explained in detail when I moved here. I have now full control over the content of the blog, the layout, design and I can do it all on the iPad. And now I also have all the past content migrated, which was very difficult, because…

My blog has evolved over the years dramatically: domains, blog engines, hosts…

Here’s the evolution of my blog over the years:

2008 - personal blog and a productivity magazine

I set up my personal blog on April 24, 2008 at Sliwinski.Biz as Internet Business Productivity Blog on Wordpress engine.
On August 5, 2008 I launched Productive! Magazine blog at ProductiveMagazine.com and Wordpress engine as well.

2009 - video show and a new domain for my personal blog

On July 20, 2009 I launched Productive! Show vlog at ProductiveShow.com on Wordpress engine, too.

Up to this point, I had three separate blogs on three separate domains to host and manage. Apart from Nozbe blog of course!

It didn’t take long when I started to make some changes, improvements and optimizations:

On October 30, 2009 I migrated my private blog to a new domain MichaelNozbe.com as it reflected my then-Twitter handle @MichaelNozbe. The blog was hosted on a now-defunct service called Posterous which simplified the blogging for me - all I had to do was to send an email to my blog and it would be posted and re-posted. No more Wordpress.

2010 - consolidation of the Productive! brand

A year later, on October 4,2010 I decided to merge all the “Productive!” things together and migrated both the magazine and show to a new site called ProductiveFirm.com, still hosted with Wordpress.

2013 - further consolidation to just one blog

In the meantime, together with my Nozbe CTO, Tomasz Kapelak, we developed a new blogging engine that synced with Dropbox and consisted of text files written in Markdown, which we called Zenlous. So…

On January 14, 2013 I the two blogs into one under my new domain MichaelSliwinski.com based on the new engine. The migration wasn’t very smooth, but it kinda worked. I stopped using the Productive! brand - only for the magazine.
On March 25 of the same year I set up a link blog to posts links to social media, but later I closed it down.

2015 - new shorter domain and The Podcast

On February 26, 2015 I finally got a domain for just my family name: sliwinski.com so I decided to simplify the blog’s address even more. I bought the domain from a broker for quite a few bucks but it was worth it. Now my personal email was michael AT sliwinski DOT com - pretty neat!
On June 25, 2015 I launched The Podcast with my buddy, Radek. We hosted the whole thing (both audio files and blog posts) on Squarespace.

2020 - even shorter domain and similar, but different blogging engine with The Podcast included. Polish and Spanish site as a bonus!

On July 22, 2020 I set up a new blog at michael.team and decided to use a similar blogging engine to my good-old Zenlous but with many more cool features, called Jekyll and host it on GitHub Pages.

However, I noticed that over the years and the migrations that followed, many of my past blog posts where poorly formatted or were missing images or were no longer relevant. I wanted to take this time to clean it up, so I started migrating each blog post by hand, using Siri Shortcuts on my iPad. By the end of 2020 I managed to migrate posts from 2020, 2019 and 2018 as well as all episodes of The Podcast (with show notes!). I’ve also added all the Nozbe webinars to the site.

With the migration to this new site I could expand and do something I always wanted. For example now I can:

Have a Polish blog where I write in my mother tongue or link to resources like my guest appearances in Poland or past iMagazine columns or Nozbe webinars.
Have a Spanish blog where I post my Spanish webinars.
Have my book “It’s All About Passion” published to be read online for free.
Host my projects both past and new like, Dice or YouTube watcher.

2022 and onwards - my main and only blog is Michael DOT Team

Today all of the past domains mentioned in this post redirect to here and michael.team becomes my one and only place on the Internet.

As the old site redirects to here, as a souvenir I saved screenshots in PDF of the home page, speaking page and contact page.

Migration using Siri Shortcuts on the iPad

If you’re curious, I’ve used several Siri Shortcuts to migrate my blog from the old one. All done on the iPad.

These scripts will not be useful out of the box, you’d have to edit them and adjust to your needs, but they can show you how powerful Siri Shortcuts can be for such a migration.

Over the course of the migration I’ve been modifying these scripts and editing them to speed up or change how some things work.

Only place on the Internet? Not quite…

OK, so this is my main place on the Internet but not technically the only one. I also set up:

No Office book site where I edit the #NoOffice book, also hosted on GitHub Pages with Jekyll.
iPad Only book site where I posted the entire #iPadOnly book to be read for free. Also on GitHub Pages and Jekyll.
Nozbe blog is still a place I post to, of course.
plus my social media…

Here’s to the future of Michael DOT team!

But who knows? Maybe some of these things will be consolidated in the future, as well? As you can see from my past history, I keep blogging, keep evolving and keep migrating and consolidating.

I keep changing my mind.

But for now, here’s to this site, here’s to Michael.team. 🎉 🚀 🥂

Tuesday, January 18, 2022 /sliwinski_com/