TheWayoftheWeb

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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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!