I've had a new web server for a couple months and I've been slowly testing things as I can in preparation for a move of the main SQLServerCentral.com site. What I thought would be a simple, click on everything test, has turned into quite a challenge, and more tedious than I imagined.

The big issue has been that we have purchased a few things, like the forum software, that requires a specific domain to be authorized. In this case, the code we have is keyed to www.ssc.com, which isn't my test site for obvious reasons. I could add a localhost entry on my machine, but I've gotten into trouble before forgetting to switch things back, so I only do this when I really have some dedicated testing time for this and nothing else.

The other issue is that for some reason early on we entered the absolute URL in many places. I think this was to make it easier for the newsletter generation, but we could have handled that better. What this now means is that in many places the whole "http://www." is encoded in the database, rendering my test site broken. Often I click on a link and it takes me back to the production site and I need to search and replace the hostname with my test site.

Note that I'm not giving it out because it's not ready for prime time.

But it's close. With some testing time tomorrow, I'm hoping to make a switch this weekend for a few hours and test things. So if things aren't working this weekend, have some patience. I'll likely switch back before Monday and make the real cut in a week or so.