Moving from Blogger to WordPress – the saga continues

Once more I’ve learned a lesson about doing the appropriate research before jumping into something! My move from Blogger to WordPress ran into problems when I tried the feature to ‘auto-import from blogger’ feature, due to the fact I’m with Godaddy hosting. So I had to export from blogger, import into a WordPress.com blog, then export from there and import into my hosted WordPress blog! And even then 6 months of my blog somehow disappeared, and are still being re-added when I have time.

But on top of that I forgot to put a proper redirect for people visiting my old blog, assuming that a post telling them I’d moved, and the lack of new content would see my old blog gently slip under the waves of the Google search…Wrong!

Not only did my old blog continue to rank higher than this one (Google PR4), and still attract visitors, but if they visited an individual post, there was no indication I’d moved. And I suspect all that duplicate content is why this blog still has a Page Rank of 0. Google no like duplicate content.

Tonight, I finally sorted it out, thanks to the excellent ‘How to redirect Blogger Beta to WordPress instructions here. So now my old blog will finally be removed from Google, visitors are automatically redirected, there’s a direct redirect to individual posts where the importing actually worked, and there’s even a public information notice up explaining!

I get there in the end!

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Importing from Blogger to WordPress with Godaddy hosting

There’s going to be some interruption to posting as I manually import about 6 months of blog posts that appear to have gone missing during my transfer from Blogger to WordPress.

The original import failed completely, until I spotted other users had problems importing – specifically when they are hosted by Godaddy. The easy way around this is to export, and then import to a hosted WordPress.com blog, and then import it from there to your hosted blog.

Worked fine for me until the import failed due to a rogue character somewhere that I just can’t find.

So now it’s Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for a while, whilst also trying to post some new stuff every so often, and rebuild by Page Rank and link equity…Who would ever transfer blogs!

Moving blogs is worse than moving house…

At least when I move house, it’s just a lot of packing, lifting and unpacking again. But moving blogs is traumatic, particularly switching to WordPress after two years with Blogger.

So far I’ve mastered the arts of hosting, domains, adding themes and plug-ins, and adding a widget or two.

But even with the Feedburner plug-in, I can’t seem to redirect the stock RSS feeds, which is a pain in the backside. I don’t want to start really promoting this new location and trying to recover my Google PR and Technorati ranks etc, until I’ve got some way of tracking any and all RSS subscribers.

*sigh*

Having a proper domain seemed like such a good idea at the time. And at least I’m learning some more…

Well, I’m getting there…

OK, so I still need to sort out all the relevant plugins, widgets etc, etc, but at least I’ve settled on a base template. Finally. Although, to be fair, there are a huge range of templates for WordPress that are all pretty good – especially compared with the limitations of Blogger, which I’m far more familiar with!

So, now to install a plugin to start customising this theme, and porting other any relevant widgets which I’ll be keeping. Then I’ll finally be up to date and ready to rock.

At last.

In the meantime, you can still keep up with the old Way of the Web blog, at http://www.thewayoftheweb.blogspot.com.

And I couldn’t resist starting a new blog on Blogger, just to keep with it, and experiment without splashing out on hosting. I would have switched to the hosted version of WordPress, but I wanted to see how advertising would work. It’s ad http://www.nissannxworld.blogspot.com, and it’s dedicated to the Nissan NX car range. The site was prompted by my own purchase of a 1993 Nissan 100 NX, so it’s very much a personal fun project…