Moving is never easy

It wasn’t horrible moving to WordPress but it wasn’t easy either.  I have 4 years of blogs and a web page that I wanted to get into a more logical location.

I’m a tweaker anyway when it comes to design so I spent a couple days tweaking the theme and I’m still not done.

I do like that it is a lot easier to change almost any part of WordPress than it was Blogger.  Well, easier is not really the right word.  Everything is changeable on WordPress but since it is not HTML, it is a lot harder to do it from scratch.  Thus, I used a fairly maleable theme and started mucking with the parameters of it.  I’m still digging around in the bowels looking for header sizes I want to change and borders I want to move.  I’ve downloaded some widgets and some plugins and all those need some setting up as well.

I’m happy with it though.  I finally moved the old web page (which itself contains an even OLDER web page) off the front page of my domain and replaced it with the blog.  If you look along the top left of the main blog page, there are tabs and one of those leads to the old stuff.  The original pages go back to 2001 when I retired and Mimi and I hit the road in the RV.  Some of the pictures are pretty good as well.  I got a little lost wandering there the other night as I hadn’t looked at them for years either.

I was amazed that I was even able to import the Blogger posts into WordPress. It was a little bit of a kludge as I had to first switch my Blogger account to their server and upload all the posts.  I’ve had the blog on my own server since I started and there is apparently no way to import from an ftp account.

OK, so I switched everything to Blogger, exported it all to my desktop and then discovered that the file was larger than the 2mg limit.  Back to Google to read more.  I discovered that I could gzip the file and it would unzip in the background without WordPress realizing it.  Then I had to get a gzip program for Macs, TarPit was the answer.  File gzipped, upload accomplished and unzipping was seamless.

Ooops, I didn’t check one option and none of the pictures were imported.  I’d read that WP was good at not importing duplicates so I did it again.  Wrong.  Now I had 2 copies of every post, none with titles so I had to open them to see what they were.  There are 4 years of blogs here, over 400 posts so it didn’t take me long to stop trying to do it by hand.  Instead, I deleted the lot of them and started over.  Third time was a charm and all the posts are here along with their pictures and most of the formatting.  It’s an amazing feat actually, I’m impressed.

Next obstacle was trying to switch the old blog back to my ftp site.  Why?  Because when I moved it to the Blogger servers, my name was taken and I had to give it a new address.  So, no one could find it there either thus you guys would still not see the change in address post.  I spent an hour last night trying to get it to transfer but it kept stalling.  This morning, it went through in seconds.  Ta Da!

My next big job is to figure out an easy backup routine.  I have a good backup now in the gzip file so I may just do that every week.  I’d rather have it automated though.   I recently got the backups for our laptops automated and that works like a charm.  I may write about it one day.   I need the same functionality for the blog.

So, that’s the tale of moving from Blogger to WordPress, I do recommend it.  WP is fun, it’s open source and there is endless support if you spend the time to look.