Tag Archives: Blogger

Can You Hear Me Now?

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote with some satisfaction about my successful conversion from Blogger to WordPress. The new important features in WordPress 2.6.2 are truly impressive, and the Blogger entries and comments came in without a hitch, even down to the permalink names.

I should have known it was too good to be true. I noticed this week that none of my recent entries were showing up in my RSS feed. Checking out the WordPress settings, I discovered that my site didn’t even have an RSS feed. Feed queries were returning a 403 error code, which means a security access violation. Trolling the WordPress message boards turned up that problems like this can only be addressed by the hosting provider, and GoDaddy doesn’t troubleshoot applications.

I tried exporting my blog using WordPress’s wonderful XML export utility. That went fine. The trouble was that the file exceeded the 2MB import limit. I had to scrounge up a way to change that (not a big deal, actually, involving a minor change to php.ini) and test a new install of WordPress and uploading my XML file. That went fine. Ultimately, I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling WordPress and reloading my blog. Then I had to rebuild by sidebar, change the header image and reburn my feed.

Long story short, this consumed a good four to six hours of time between troubleshooting and restoring. Feedburner now says I have a working RSS feed. We’ll see. I’m hoping this item shows up in it, along with the dozen or so other extries that subscribers haven’t seen over the last two weeks.

One of these days I’m going to hire me an IT person!

Freedom from Blogger

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Over the weekend, I completed my long-awaited move from Blogger to WordPress. There’s plenty of fine-tuning left to do – and I need to get rid of the hideous graphic in the header – but the transition went pretty smoothly.

I’ve been trying to get off of Blogger for about a year, but migration difficulties – in particular, the loss of link consistency – has frustrated me. With its release of version 2.6.2, WordPress has made migration almost one-button simple. Permalinks are still going back to the previous site template, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for now to be free of the Blogger system.

I signed up for Blogger more than three years ago when I didn’t know any better. Since then, I’ve learned that blogging software can lock in a user almost as completely as any proprietary software. Because each publisher architects its service somewhat differently, migration has been a headache for years. WordPress is now resolving that problem to the point that moving to its platform no longer requires Herculean effort. I host four blogs on WordPress, with my main blog being the only exception.

Why had I grown frustrated with Blogger?

  • The selection of page templates is severely limited. I never found one I really liked. In contrast, there are thousands of free WordPress templates available. I’ve found many that I like.
  • I decided to host my blog on my own domain and use Blogger as an authoring system. This requires Blogger to FTP the files to my server, a process that had become frustratingly long and failure-prone as my site grew. Blogger offers an alternative to host your domain on its own servers for a fee, but since I was already paying a hosting service, this didn’t seem an attractive option.
  • Blogger has limited support for third-party widgets and plug-ins. WordPress has a vast library of them. This alone is enough reason to switch.
  • The Blogger content management system has far less flexibility than WordPress’, where you can customize almost anything.
  • I’ve found the results of Blogger’s “preview” function to have little to do with the resulting Web page. In contract, WordPress previews in the context of your chosen template.
  • WordPress has a function to automatically import Word documents. You still have to take out some code, but the process is pretty clean.

There are other reasons, but those are the big ones. For a basic one-button blog that’s drop-dead simple, Blogger is still a great option. But as you yearn to do more with your site, Blogger’s limitations become frustrating. Perhaps I will encounter some terrible problems in the next few days that force me to roll back, but for now, I’m enjoying the flexibility and open-source choice that WordPress provides.

Here’s a pretty good tutorial on how to make the switch.