Rob’s Blog

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Well, what a Sunday today has been. I’ve been to the gym, Chelsea have beaten Everton, West Ham have won their first game under Alan Curbishley - against Manchester United, no less - and I’ve spent a rather large amount of time moving my blog away from Blogger and onto my own web space, powered by WordPress and Streamline.net.

Why would I want to do this? Well, I must admit I quite liked the new beta of Blogger, with it’s cool little widgets and so on. It was pretty nice - very intuitive to use and both quick and easy to make good-looking designs from their library of templates.

However those who know me will know I’m a bit of a geek and I can’t help myself when it comes to getting under the hood of something to see how it works. Blogger’s main drawback was that you can’t use the nice new widget-ised templates with your own custom webspace.

In addition it seems a little silly to be using Blogger’s webspace when I can be using my own - what happens if, in the distant future, Google decide to change their terms of service or they do something I don’t like? My blog, all my stuff and anything that may link to said blog are all in a place owned by Google. So, seeing as I own my own, memorable (for me at least) domain name perhaps I should actually make use of it. So having nothing else to do on a Sunday (how did you guess that I was single?) I decided to go about moving my blog onto my own webspace.

First up: choosing a web space provider. My mate over at Evil Pandas (real name withheld to protect the innocent) recommended a UK-based company called Streamline.net. They seem pretty cool - signing up for their Power User package gives you a decent amount of web space, unlimited bandwidth, a free UK domain name (in this case I just transferred an existing domain name over) and two MySQL databases, which is pretty generous (I can use one for my Wordpress back end - more on that later - and another for my development projects). I’ve been using them all day and so far no complaints, they’ve been absolutely brilliant - even replying to a support ticket on a Sunday, which I had no right to expect. Finally, they also offer you the choice of a Windows or a Linux virtual server. I’m not sure there’s any real difference from the end user’s perspective or for performance but I went with Linux seeing as I was going to be using PHP and MySQL.

Next up was choosing a blogging platform. I went with WordPress as it looked to be exactly what I was looking for - the right mix of being easy to get started with (the whole installation took me a little under two minutes, including the initial database setup) and extremely customisable. It’s very important to note though that at the time of writing WordPress does not support any other back-end database other than MySQL.

Once I’d done this, I thought I’d get my content imported early. I know from experience it’s very hard to customise the look and feel of a site if you have nothing to guage that look and feel against - so I used WordPress’s Import function to drag through the content I already had on Blogger. Yet again quick and absolutely seamless.

Finally, customising my template. I didn’t really like the templates that come with WordPress - the default is too static (and I prefer my stuff to be dynamic) and the classic template is just plain ugly. So I had a look through the templates gallery and decided on the Web 2.0 template by Neil Merton. Sure, it’s not really Web 2.0 - no AJAX or anything like that - but it was a pretty style that was laid out exactly how I wanted it. I’m not much of a designer so if I can get the layout I want I’m happy.

I hope Neil doesn’t mind me butchering his template for my own site here. I’ve made quite a few changes to the template - tightening up some of the positioning, rearranging stuff I didn’t like and generally moving, hiding and removing stuff here and there. I’ll probably change some of the colours in the future too - although the hot pink look of the homepage is really starting to grow on me, which is quite disturbing.

With the look and feel of my site complete and all my previous content imported, the very last thing I decided to do was to install a couple of plugins. WordPress has extensive support for third-party plugins (who knows, I might even write some myself in the future) so I took to hacking it to behave how I wanted it. So far I’ve only got two - a Google Sitemaps generator, which will automatically generate an XML sitemap for Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live searches - and Front Page Filter, which I’m using to ensure that when I start using TrackBacks they don’t show up on my home page but instead on their own categorised page.

As it will shortly be Monday I’ll wrap up by saying that overall, I’m very pleased with WordPress and Streamline.net. My access seems fast, changing things is immediate, my site looks good (well I think so and that’s the important thing) and I’m finally putting my domain name to good use. So although I have spent all of my Sunday evening doing this, I strangely feel like it was a Sunday put to good use. I really should get out more…

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Blogging. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.