I finally made the leap to WordPress. I have used Blogger to power my blog since 2003 when I first started blogging. I’m beginning to wonder have I made the right decision. Blogger had it’s drawbacks, mainly in the area of comment moderation and the inability to use widgets on a self-hosted, ftp-ed blog so I had to handcraft all my widgets. I’m not a coder; it wasn’t fun – it was frustration. Then people started sending me screengrabs and I realised I hadn’t a clue. When I started working for the IIA I was given responsibility as Communications Manager for their blog which runs on WordPress. However I just have to write it – I do not have to configure it. The lovely people in Doop do that. They do all the updates and add in all the plugins etc. etc. I just boss em about. But the interface beat Blogger to bits. It allowed far more control of the content and the comment moderation knocks complete socks off Blogger’s comment moderation. Also there are some beautiful themes (site designs) available for self-hosted wordpress blogs that you just can’t get for non-blogspot blogs.
I have dilly-dallyed about transferring it for ages. I have been blogging since 2003 so me and my blog have history. As I wasn’t using a blogspot blog I had to momentarily switch the blog to blogspot so that I could suck all the 947 posts and (the very sad) 43 comments over to WordPress. I lost a few posts. All the comments (for what it’s worth) made it. Unbeknownst to me, while I was doing all this, Himself was making a little blogging history (ahem!) of his own and posting his first ever blog post. To make him feel like a real blogger I left a comment and accidentally deleted it because I forgot about Blogger’s hopeless comment moderation interface. (Y’see I’m a wordpresser already 🙂 )
The two biggest issues is that WordPress took all of what Blogger calls “Labels” and instead of turning them into tags as I expected, they turned them into categories hence the big long list on the right. The other problem was partly of my own making. I hated the way Blogger used to automatically set the title as a link to the item you were blogging about so for ever I just left out the title field when I blogged. So all my posts from 2003 to maybe late 2006 had no titles per se so I have to go back and drag the titles from the body of the posts into the title field. Borrrrring. So please bear with me while I fix that.
The other problem, very sadly for me as my social media buddies will know, is that my RSS feed isn’t bally well working! There are no “valid date/time stamps or GUIDs on items” according to Twitterfeed. When I subscribe in Google Reader it’s basically convinced that everything on the site was publised at about eight o’clock this evening. Hmmmm.
While Blogger did have some missing functionality I was very familiar with it and I regularly tinkered with the code. I’m kinda afraid to touch the underbelly of the WordPress stuff because I’m afraid I might break it.
And most importantly!! All of the links have now changed so there are going to be many broken links and missing images. If you find one please comment on the post where you found it, I’ll fix it and delete your comment. Thanks a million!