This blog is being domain mapped and has been for years now. The traffic on it became so low on my self hosted wordpress.org install that I did not feel the cost of web hosting justified keeping it on paid hosting.  So last week the contents have been moved back to free hosting at the root blog here on wordpress.com.

Sadly the result of moving my blog content is thousands of broken links – yes! thousands.  Many of the links embedded in the anchor text within my posts and static pages are broken and when clicked they produce a “404″ page not found.  Some aren’t broken but most are.  As these posts have all been indexed by Google and the other search engines, what’s happening is that those visitors coming into the blog by way of search engines are experiencing “404″s page not found.

In addition to those broken links, for years I have manually included related links to my earlier posts at the end of most of my posts when embedding them in anchor text within posts was not preferable. You guessed it — they are broken too.

I cannot express in polite language how angry and how depressed I am with this result. I have exported and imported from wordpress.com to wordpress.org previously and have never ever experienced such an issue. I  believe it’s possible that when this new linking was introduced into the wordpress software it led to what I have experienced but don’t know that for sure. What I do know is that I am not the only one who has experienced this replicating image problem.

I have deleted all the Categories that unexpectedly replicated. I have not yet had the time to delete all the images that also unexpectedly replicated. I discovered something and contacted Staff. I use the Inuit Types theme and when I set a featured image a large distorted image was created by wordpress. All of those large images are now taking up space.  I will be slowly going through my blog and editing and deleting the posts they are in one at a time, and will no longer use the “featured images” feature on this blog or on my other blog.

Staff replied to my request for a means of bulk editing of featured images when I contacted them  follows:

> 1. My question is: Is it currently possible to bulk edit posts and remove featured images or not?

It’s not currently possible to do this, no.

> 2. If it is not possible to bulk edit posts and remove featured images then I am definitely requesting that this feature be added.

Featured Images are a core WordPress feature and would need to be changed there before such a change would appear on WordPress.com. You may even want to suggest this yourself at http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/ .

For the next while I will be attempting to create and publish new posts on this blog while ‘fixing” the royal mess in the background. As my family, husband and work come first this work will not be done quickly.

If any of my regular readers would like to submit a guest post for publication then I will be most grateful.  I’s also like to express my gratitude to my friend Richard who is the Co-Admin on my blogs.  I value his  friendship over the course of nearly 4 years and the skills he generously shares very much.