TheWayoftheWeb

As someone who moved this blog from Blogger to the current self-hosted Wordpress location back in April, I’m keenly aware of the problems you can encounter if you switch blogging platforms.

As a result, I’d defintely advise starting with Wordpress, but if you’re not ready to host your own site (It’s really far more simple than it sounds!), then you’re limited to Wordpress.com, which has all the functionality, but doesn’t allow you to display any advertising – a pain if you’re trying to see if something might drive some revenue, for example!

And while there are some very well-respected people using Blogger (such as Dave Cushman at Faster Future), and some good resources for some nice templates (such as BloggerBuster), I’m learning far more from the greater flexibility of WP.

Switching from Blogger should be simple in theory, but having exported, I found I had to import into a Wordpress.com blog, then export from that into my hosted version – and even then a lot of posts seemed to get lost en route (They’re still on my old Blogger blog awaiting the remote possibility I’ll find the time to finish manually importing them).

Therefore it’s great news that Google (which owns Blogger), has released Google Blog Convert 1.0. It’s from the fantastically named Data Liberation team, and it’s a new Open Source project to allow you to move blog posts and comments from service to service, including Blogger, Wordpress, Moveable Type and LiveJournal.

It’s not only great news for anyone considering switching services.

It’s also great news if you want to use the quick and easy implementation of Blogger to get something just up and running with some adverts etc to see if it works, and then switch later.

It certainly means I’m less reluctant about using Blogger to experiment, and I’d be more likely to be enticed back by something suitable.

I’ve been trying to manually import the remaining content from my old Blogger blog, but it’s been slow going. So there may be a little less posting while I finally finish the job.

Plus I also need to upgrade my blogs to the new Wordpress 2.6. I hesitated a little due the problems outlined hear, but if you’re having problems logging in, apparently clearing your cookies will solve it.

I’m willing to take the risk to be able to post from anywhere and hopefully increase my output once more…

I know all the tech news type blogs will have covered this in-depth, but the new version of Wordpress, 2.6 ‘Tyner’ has arrived one month ahead of schedule and looks awesome.

Post from anywhere is going to be incredibly useful, particularly in a blogosphere still worrying that microblogging is quicker and easier.  The wiki tracking of edits could be really helpful on my group blog over at www.140char.com, meaning that group posts could now be properly collaborative. Plus little things like wordcounts and image captions that make a big difference.

Having spent a lot of time on Blogger, I’m so glad I made the switch, even if it meant sacrificing my Google Page Rank for while!

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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