Blogger to WordPress

Since I spent some time this week on moving this blog from blogger to WordPress, and I know some of you out there are contemplating a move, thought I will share my thoughts and experiences with you.

First of all, I am not recommending everyone to move to WordPress, I think blogger has its own advantages, it really is much simpler to use than WordPress, if you are just starting out. But I wanted to list out my reasons for the move, and to give you some tips if you do decide to move.

Disclaimer: I have been on blogger for about ten months now, and on WordPress for about two days, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

What makes WordPress better?

• Categories:- The single most important reason for my move – hierarchical categories in WordPress. The Blogger labels are quite a waste really. WordPress gives you a lot of flexibility in categorizing your posts and for displaying the categories in a hierarchical list. This will help in building an auto-updating recipe index without much hacks as I was trying to do in blogger.
• Static Pages:- You can’t create static pages in Blogger. There are so many reasons one would want to create a page that talks about the blog and the author, another page that lists a bunch of links, then may be a page for a recipe index etc. In blogger, you have two options – one is to make a post for each static information you want to publish, and change the date to an ancient date, so that it doesn’t show up on your home page. Other option is to create a different blog, copy the template etc, so that the reader doesn’t feel like she is moving between two different blogs. Both are real ugly hacks if you ask me. WordPress takes care of this beautifully, by allowing you to create static pages, that are even comment enabled.
• Pingbacks – Blogger does not support automatic pingbacks, there is the Blogs that link here feature, but it never really worked for me. WordPress will let you know immediately as soon as someone links to one of your posts, pingbacks are integrated into the comments section, and are also protected by the spam filtering.
• Smilies –   Yep, WordPress can convert all those nifty little smilies into cute emoticons. If this is the only reason you want to go through the trouble of moving your posts , I would strongly recommend you to reconsider this. But it sure is a nice little plus if you have other stronger reasons to do so.
• Comments – WordPress has a lot of built in enhancements for comments. If you are the type who likes to answer your reader’s comments, WordPress lets you do this right in the comment. I think it is a much nicer experience than blogger, where you have to answer separately, and do little tricks to highlight the reader’s names. WordPress also has built in spam protection, a plug in that can check for a bunch of criteria to filter out spam , like the number of hyperlinks, certain words and IP addresses (that you can configure). All Blogger has is the word verification which works against spam bots, but doesn’t stop someone from spamming you manually.
• Blog Stats – There is no in-built stats tracking in Blogger, you have to go with a third party tool like statscounter , Google analytics etc. WordPress gives you some basic tracking information, though if you want a more extensive tracking log, you still need to go with the third party tools
• Split posts – I don’t know the technical term for this, but WordPress has a built in option to split your post into two, everything above the line will show up by default on your homepage, and provides a Read More… link to open the full post. This is a cool little feature to keep your homepage clutter free, though there are two lines of thought on this. Some people don’t like having to click on a extra link to read the full post, especially if they are reading multiple posts on your homepage in one go. Clicking the more link takes you away from the homepage and to the post, so you need to click on back button, or home to go back to the homepage. I haven’t made up my mind on this yet, so I am going with this for now. You can add this feature to blogger too, there are multiple web sites that shows you how, but it involves editing your template.

Free WordPress hosted blog Vs Self hosted WordPress blog

If you are not familiar with the two options WordPress provides, I think it is an important factor to consider before you make the move. A free WordPress hosted blog has a .Wordpress.com domain name (you can use your own domain name, but you need to buy some credits for it), and offers you very limited control to customize the web site. A self hosted WordPress blog is where you install the WordPress software on your web server, the data is completely stored on your own server, WordPress gives you the platform to manage and render this.
Here are the main differences between the two

• Free WordPress blogs are so much easier to manage. No mucking with the code, no mucking the stylesheets etc. There are some custom built-in themes you can use, but you won’t be able to customize your stylesheets. You need to buy some credits to make edits to the stylesheet. Same thing with adding custom JavaScript code to your template. You will never muck around with the template html like in blogger, it can be a good thing or bad.
• You cannot install custom themes, widgets, plugins etc in a free WordPress hosted blog. There are a bunch of built-in plugins, so your basic needs will be taken care of. But there are so many cool plugins out there, most of those free, that you can’t take advantage of if you are on the free blog. If you are self hosting, you have so much more options to customize your styles and download new plugins and templates.
• In self-hosted WordPress, you will have to install WordPress on your web server, and whenever they update the WordPress software, you need to backup your site, and move to the next version if you want to take advantage of the cool new features. Obviously I haven’t done this yet, so I don’t know how hard this is. If you are on the WordPress servers, they will take care of the upgrade for you.
• You can always go with a hosting provider that pre-installs WordPress on your server, if you don’t want to deal with the manual installation procedure. I have a godaddy.com account, who doesn’t have this feature, so I did the installation myself. It was pretty straightforward and painless, all you need to do is copy some files over to the web server, set up a mysql database, modify a php file with the mysql connection information, and browse to the install file. I have to warn you that I am a geek, I can’t judge how difficult this will be for a non-technical person.

Blogger vs Free WordPress hosted blog

Now that you know the differences between both the options, here are the relative merits and demerits of blogger and the free WordPress account.

• Blogger lets you customize the heck out of your template. You can select a basic template, and edit the entire html and stylesheet for this. A free WordPress.com blog does not give you access to the html, and the self hosted one does, but there are multiple pages you need to muck around with, you have to be at least a semi-geek to be able to do this, and some good php knowledge will take you a long way.
• An addition to the above point, WordPress gives you a bunch of themes, but you won’t be able to update anything. I personally like three column templates, but all the built in three column templates in blogger and WordPress have a narrow content area, which can be expanded by tweaking the stylesheets. Easy to do in blogger, but in a WordPress hosted blog, you need to buy credits to make any small changes to the stylesheet.
• Having said the above point, I don’t know if you will ever have that many pressing needs to muck around with the html. Free WordPress blog gives you a bunch of widgets that you can use to customize the sidebars, so most of your needs are taken care of. Also, in Blogger , if you make a lot of customization to your template, it will all be lost as soon as you go to another template. This won’t happen in WordPress hosted blog, since you are never touching the page structure.

Should I switch?

I am sure I’ve confused you more by now. So if you are still wondering whether to switch or not, here is something to consider if you have a .blogspot address. Switching means that you are going to have a brand new url. All that time you spent getting people to notice your blog, and getting people to link to your site, you are going to have to redo it all. You can keep your old blog, and add a link to the new URL from there, but it is going to take some time before all those links are updated and your Google page rank goes up again.

I am going to do it. Any tips?

First of all good luck. Some tips to make this a little easier on you.

• Moving your data over: If you are moving to a .wordpress.com account, there is a blogger to wordpress import option, that will import all your posts and comments and labels. But if you are moving to a self hosted account, it doesn’t work. Well, it didn’t work for me on my godaddy.com account. Not sure if the other hosts with built in wordpress installation supports this. So here is how I did it.
  • Create a new wordpress.com blog and use the import feature to move your blogger data.
  • Use the export function in wordpress to export this data to a an XML file in WordPress extended RSS format, will contain your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories
  • Now from your self hosted wordpress blog, use the import feature to import this XML file.
  • This works seamlessly if the XML file is less than 2 MB, the default upload size on the host server. (this is the default on my account.). You can change this value in the php.ini file for your hoster, but that requires a web site restart, I didn’t know how to do this. So I split my file into two, and did the import twice. (Do this only if you know what you are doing, if you make a small mistake, the XML will get messed up. Back up the data beforehand.)
• Keeping the links intact: Did you have a .blogspot.com account, and you want to move to your own self hosted wordpress.com account? If you want to keep your page rank, I suggest you do the move in two steps.
  • Get a custom domain name, and point your blogger to use the custom domain. Blogger will automatically redirect all the links to your old .blogspot.com account to your new yourdomainname.com URL, and the search engines will pick up the changes pretty quick as well.
  • Once you have the custom domain set up, then make the switch to your self hosted wordpress platform. Do not update your blogger blog’s custom domain settings, just update the CNAME at your domain host. This way blogger will keep converting your .blogspot.com links to the corresponding yourdomain.com links, which are now in your wordpress.com account.Here is how this will work.
    • You have xxx.blogspot.com . Buy a domain called xxx.com and update blogger settings to use the custom domain.
    • Blogger will send all the links to xxx.blogspot.com to xxx.com . So xxx.blogspot.com/2007/09/MyPost.html will be automatically redirected to xxx.com/2007/09/MyPost.html , even after you update the xxx.com settings to point to your own hosted wordpress blog, instead of a Google nameserver.
  • Update your permalink structure: You need to do a simple tweak in wordpress though. The permalinks in wordpress are by default in the format xxx.com/?p=nnn where the nnn is a random post number.
    You can change it to use a custom permalink structure like this: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html .
    This way most of your blogger post links will still work. There are some differences in the way blogger and wordpress constructs links though, wordpress uses all the characters in your post title, but blogger omits some words like a, the etc , so those permalinks will be broken.
  • –Add redirects for your RSS feeds URL. (Big Thanks to Manisha for the tip)
    Blogger RSS feed is normally at the URL http://domain.com/feeds/posts/default but the wordpress RSS feed URL is http://domain.com/feed . You can add a permanent redirect at your web host to redirect your old feed links to the new ones.

    This can be done by adding an entry to the .htaccess file on your web site’s root directory. Use ftp to access this file, and add following lines after the existing entries. 

    Redirect 301 /feeds/posts/default http://domain.com/feed

    Redirect 301 /feeds/posts/default?alt=rss http://domain.com/feed

    Redirect 301 /feeds/comments/default http://domain.com/comments/feed

    Redirect 301 /feeds/comments/default?alt=rss http://domain.com/comments/feed

    Save the file. This will redirect the subscribers of your old feeds to the new feeeds.

I am happy with Blogger, just need my own domain name

Blogger lets you point to your own domain name for free. Of course you need to pay for the domain name, but all the data is still stored on the Google server, so no need to pay for web hosting services. Check out  Blogger Help for details on how to do this.

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions. If any of the facts listed are wrong, please let me know. I look for feedback from long time wordpress users, in case I’ve missed anything.

I am glad I switched, I see a lot of possibilities, all I need is some time to sit and do all the cool stuff I could. I’ve never dealt with php before, but if you know one language, you pretty much know it all, so hoping to get into it soon.

Technorati tags: WordPress vs Blogger, Switching from blogger to WordPress

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