After one week of strug­gling with HTML, Php and other bar­baric names… here I am on Wodrpress !

The move wasn’t that smooth… but quite inter­est­ing actu­ally.

I had made the deci­sion to switch from Blog­ger to Word­Press a few weeks ear­lier. I wanted more flex­i­bil­ity, I wanted to learn more about cod­ing, and I’ve been blog­ging for almost a years now — I knew I wasn’t going to quit any­time soon.

My quest started on Blog­geries, where I’m a mod­er­a­tor (yeah, I ban peo­ple for fun and I love being sadis­tic !). I got basic advices for the move : I learned that I would lose my PG3 (oh well) but that it was pos­si­ble to import all my Blog­ger post to Word­Press fairly eas­ily, my main concern.

So, I needed a domain name. I set­tled for “Cor­rer Es Mi Des­tino” (“to run is my des­tiny” in Span­ish, a line from a song I love), fol­low­ing Jorge’s advice (I was going to pick my Chi­nese name as a domain !). I bought my domain name at GoDaddy : the trans­ac­tion was smooth, although I hated to web­site design and omnipresent ads everywhere.

I then picked a host­ing site. I set­tled for Site5 and their $5/ month deal. Reg­is­ter­ing was easy but acti­vat­ing my account took way too long in my opin­ion… how­ever, a few days later I was all set.

Site5 is quite user-friendly and I was able to install Word­Press eas­ily thanks to a Fan­tas­tico script. Here I was, with the default Word­Press tem­plate for the first time on my own .com. How emo­tional. Nah, just kid­ding, I’m not that bad.

The Word­Press inter­face is quite sim­i­lar to Blogger’s. I didn’t have major prob­lem there. How­ever, the real fun started with the tem­plate customization…

I knew import­ing my heavily-customized CSS from Blog­ger was a big no-no. But since I didn’t want to pick a free tem­plate, I tried my best to recre­ate my Blogspot atmos­phere. I picked a free 3 columns tem­plate and started from there. I’m quite com­fort­able with CSS, but Php was a night­mare at first… Just chang­ing the header took me almost a full day (for­tu­nately, I was on hol­i­days !). The side­bars weren’t very coop­er­a­tive when it came to set­ting mar­gins and my main con­tent dis­ap­peared sev­eral time. Let’s just say I was quite bitchy focused some­times at home !

I then imported my blog from Blog­ger. Or at least, tried. Word­Press 2.2 has a build-in import func­tion, but unfor­tu­nately it doesn’t work any­more because Google recently changed their API. A quick fix exists (edit­ing blogger.php) but it doesn’t seem to work for Word­Press blogs hosted on a per­sonal domain. Alright, what do I do, then ? I asked for help on the Word­Press sup­port forum but got no replies… my biggest dis­ap­point­ment dur­ing this move was actu­ally the WP forum. Ques­tions aren’t answered and when they are, the mod­er­a­tors and admins are extremely tech­ni­cal, thus mak­ing things harder. I under­stand there’s no easy way and there’s some research to be done, but we have to start some­where… right ? I finally fig­ured a way around : I started a blog on WordPress.com, imported my Blog­ger from there and then imported from WordPress.com to my own website.

My fonts were a bit messed up in the process but I’m work­ing on that… and I’m sure there are still a few bugs here and there — should be fixed soon. There were a thou­sands lit­tle things to do, once the basic tem­plate was look­ing fine : installing the fav­i­con, set­ting up my archives, import­ing my blogroll, my old wid­gets, sign­ing up with Google Ana­lyt­ics… all that took a while.

Over­all, I’m quite happy with Word­Press. Sure, it’s much more tech­ni­cal that I though it would be : Blog­ger is a good place to start a blog quickly with min­i­mum knowl­edge, and I’m glad I learned my basics there. Word­Press is extremely flex­i­ble : thou­sands of plu­g­ins are avail­able, design­ing new func­tions is a bliss and there’s no limit on what I can do. Feels good, very good.

I moved my blogroll with me so you’re all here guys ! If I for­got some­one, if your link isn’t work­ing please let me know and I’ll fix it right away. If you can update your own blogroll with this new Cor­rer Es Mi Des­tino, that would be great too !

Now I’m gonna stop being such a nerd and I’ll be back to my usual writ­ing soon !

Related arti­cles:

1. Tweak Your Blog (6÷10)
2. Blog­ger Vs. Word­Press (1÷10)
3. Must Have On Your Blog (5÷10)
4. The Kind­ness Of Strangers
5. The Best Plu­g­ins (2÷10)