Blogger to Wordpress; first thoughts : Cennydd Bowles on user experience

And thus I emerge, blinking, on the other side, having seen things I wish to never see again. Debates on the security risks of chmod 777. Regular expressions. 301 redirects and other such server-side horrors. In all, a testing transition, but one that must surely extend geek cred for another twelve months.

Of course, right now I’m lumbered with a design I don’t like, unsolved 404s on archives and longer-titled posts, and probably a decreased PageRank. Despite all this, I feel good about having made the switch. We all know that Blogger isn’t regarded as a suitable tool for professionals, and frankly I only stuck with it as a result of seven years of inertia. Luckily, WordPress has already elicited a ‘wow’ or two from me (the Import feature was a thing of beauty) and I’m really excited to see what it can do. Early next week I’ll fix the last of the redirects and get knee-deep in CSS…

3 comments on Blogger to WordPress; first thoughts

tom on 9 May 08:

ooh, creations tab :)

Are you going to implement any kind of GIANT footer?

Caz Mockett on 16 June 08:

Interesting you’ve jumped ship, I’m in the process of migrating at least 3 of my blogs from blogger to bespoke-hosted WP on my domain.

I’ve been wanting to do it for ages, but my ISP only just pulled their finger out to get the right version of msSQL to make the WP istallation possible.

And now, I’m knee deep in CSS too – as well as spitting and polishing various bits of my themes which now match the relevent parts of my site.

I’ve still to get the mod-rewrite thing working for pretty URLs, for the moment it will have to be obscure query strings. But I’m getting there…

:-)

cennydd on 16 June 08:

A web design/dev blog is a busman’s holiday. Right now, when I get home from work the last thing I want to do is more design and coding, much as I love it. So it may actually be a while before I actually get round to doing this thing justice.

I was lucky with the URL redirects, I have a friend who’s a dab hand with regular expressions. Rather him than me.

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