Migrated to WordPress
Posted in Blogging by Ben Christian on February 12th, 2006 I found that there were too many limitations with blogger so I decided to migrate to WordPress. I now have my blog uploaded to a web hosting server which gives me more flexibility. The primary reasons for migrating to WordPress were:
- Google search results for my blogger entries would only go to www.benchristian.com. With WordPress the search results point directly to the blog entry (the permalink).
- Blogger doesn’t have categories. I originally made some modifications to my blogger template so that I could implement categories but it was becoming too burdensome to maintain.
- I wanted to remove the blogger toolbar but in doing so I’d loose the search this blog functionality and would be breaching the blogger terms and conditions
I still have a bit of work to do in getting my blog back to normal (mainly moving all of the images across). I’m also still searching for a template that I really like, in the meantime this one will do.
Ben Christian said,
February 13, 2006 @ 11:55 am
Now that I’ve redelegated my domain and aren’t using domain forwarding the google search results for my blogger entries are going straight to the blogger permalink (how ironic). I’m guessing that the domain forwarding had someting to do with it, more specifically the “URLKeeper” option.
“When you turn URLKeeper ON, the domain name will remain in the browser address window no matter what link a person clicks on within your web site.”
With that said, I’m happier with WordPress anyway; but I’m still on the lookout for another template.
Gary Slinger said,
February 14, 2006 @ 1:39 am
It’s not a perfect solution, but when I moved from wordpress.com to a privately hosted Wordpress installation, I looked at my site stats, and the top hits in Google, and then went and manually edited those entries to say “This post has moved”, and gave the new URL.
I get plenty of hits a day, still, from those “manual” referrer links.
G.
Ben Christian said,
February 14, 2006 @ 6:02 pm
Thanks Gary. considering I don’t have too many posts I did exactly what you suggested on all of them.
Ben Stokes said,
February 20, 2006 @ 8:58 am
I’ve also been thinking of migrating to Wordpress. I figure there must be a good reason why everyone else is using it! I really could do with the wordpress comment moderation process .. I get too much comment spam. Did you have a hard time migrating your posts?
Ben Christian said,
February 20, 2006 @ 9:52 am
I’m pretty happy with wordpress. I haven’t used b2evoltion though so I’m afraid I can’t comment on whether its better or not.
Wordpress has some import options; I used the import from blogger option which went very smoothly. There isn’t a built in option to migrate directly from b2evolution, but it has the ability to import from an RSS 2.0 feed which looks pretty straight forward.
Although I found that there were’nt as many nice looking templates/skins when compared to blogger, there are loads of really useful add-ins.