I am attempting to move this site from Blogger to WordPress. And here is my own convoluted story about why I’ve decided to make the move.
I wanted to self host my blogs. So I thought I would just use Blogger’s features to do that. They allow you to use your own domain with a flick of the ftp button. I also wanted categories and tags badly. Pre-beta, Blogger did not have that capability. So pre-beta, I managed to make a blogger hack work. The very next day, Blogger went beta and I converted my account to the new Blogger. And what do you know? They have categories, tags and other goodies. I felt optimistic. Then the axe fell when I discovered that of course, their categories feature had to use a database and of course, that meant if I wanted to self host, I couldn’t use the dynamic features of Blogger Beta which depended on their database. That was because last I heard you cannot take Blogger’s database with you if you plan to host your own Blogger sites. I was back at square one. It was then I decided to bite the bullet and go WordPress. Apparently, WordPress gives you everything and the kitchen sink care of PHP, MySQL, plugins and other programmatic extensions.
In summary, here are my reasons for doing this:
- Blogger had no categories (though Blogger Beta does, I wouldn’t be able to self host if I used their new “labels” features). Hence, my blogs have no categories. I have no tags. Without tags, I feel like a second class citizen in the blogosphere.
- Fellow bloggers gave me some advice and told me so
- Some articles insisted that I do so.
- Better now than later (less content to import)
- I want my own domain
Happily, WordPress installed itself easily on my server. Not so happily, the import facility refused to work between Blogger and WordPress. Why?? You got it… Whatever interface there was between the WordPress importer and Blogger got screwed up with Blogger Beta. So either I do the import manually or wait till a nice WP guru comes along to rewrite the import functions. I have decided that for now, I will just play around with the WordPress framework and work on my skins. I’m buying time for the WordPress importer to get back into business. I’m crossing my fingers I won’t have to do copy and paste transfers! All this means that I have no idea when my blogs will end up in WordPress. But I sure hope it happens in this century.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I haven’t used Blogger, but Wordpress is pretty easy to get used to and is a great opportunity to flex your css/php skills. I think you’ll really enjoy it. If you are looking for hosting, check out DreamHost – they have been great, include easy installation of Wordpress and other 3rd party software, and offer a lot of bandwidth and space. You can use promo code MONEYNHAPPINESS for $50 off. Sorry for the plug, but they’ve been good to me so far. Anyway, I’ll be looking forward to the new look.
-Ed over at Will Money Buy Happiness?
wordpress all the way, hosting on your own domain is where its at, and who doesn’t love plug ins
Yeah, WordPress is the way to go. Hosting your own blog helps to because it gives you more options. Most people do not know that the larger hosting companies have automated the installation of WordPress.
Purchase a domain for under $10.00, buy hosting for under $4.00/mo and away you go….
Well I have found the Wordpress more easy to use.
I also wanted my own domain for blogging, so Wordpress seemed to be the best fit. It worked rather nicely out of the box, but the categories feature was a little hard to work with at first. It is important to make sure you give WRITE permissions to the .htaccess file (which must first be created in the home directory) and also to the style.css stylesheet. I wondered at first why categories wouldn’t work. It turns out that ModRewrite must be enabled via the .htaccess file. Wordpress does a good job at automatically pruning the configuration files once they are created.
Please can you describe in steps by steps how to transfer my blogspot site to self hosted domain of wordpress software yet to be installed. My host doesn’t have fantastico and wordpress in cpanel.
2much4free,
I’m sorry I can’t provide a tutorial. I found a web host that helped install Wordpress for me. Then I transferred all my old posts by hand.
I read that Blogger may have software to help automatically migrate the posts over. But when I did my own migration, this software wasn’t quite available so I had to do it by hand!
Cool!
WordPress is an open source software, it gives experienced bloggers much more flexibility when it comes to customizing a blog.
I prefer wordpress. Blogger doesn’t have any of the capabilities that wordpress has, blogger is just more user friendly in my opinion.
I totally agree that one should self host their website as that is just a small initial investment for anyone who is serious about internet marketing.