Finally i moved from Blogger to WordPress
I am still on vacation so i used Thursday to move my blog as described in my last post. As already mentioned i preferred WordPress so i gave it try on www.wordpress.com one of the free hosted site. Already the first impressions where grate i played around a little bit and felt very comfortable with the interface and the functionality that was provided. So I started to search how i can transfer the old posting and comments. At http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpres i found an article how this can be done easily. WordPress supports an importer for several sources and Blogger is one of them. So i tried it an after a few minutes the content was transfered. I was very impressed how easy this part worked.
After i had finished the first import i tried to set up the http://blog.gerd-saurer.com domain to my hosted WordPress log. Unfortunately i could not register a CNAME entry so i decided to install my own WordPress instance on the server. After an hour everything was working and I searched and installed the most important Plugins (FeedBurner, Google Analyticator, …). Then began the most complicated part – finding an template that fits your needs. I found one but as so much of them it was optimized for 800×600 screens. I do not believe anyone is surfing with this solution any more so I changed it to an 1024×768. I hope you like the Theme.
No it was time to change all important tracking tools from the old to the new instance. First i changed my domain settings for blog.gerd-saurer.com at my provider. I created an new FeedBurner feed to track the old Blogger instance feed and changed the URL of the original post and comment feeds to the new WorPress instance. When this was finished i activated the Analytic settings and finally posted on my old blog my last message with an information that this will be the last message that is published on this blog and that everyone that receives this message via an RSS reader should update the feed URL.
Finally I tried to set up a mechanism to redirect people accessing my blog directly to the new one. You can find a nice HowTo at http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress.
It took me nearly one day to switch my whole blog. If it would have been possible to use the WordPress service hosted I think half a day would have bean enough. Everything was easy and straight forward. I hope the decision to move to WordPress was right.
Once again I apologies for the troubles the the moving had cause you but finally as you read this post you have switched successfully. I am looking forward for interesting posting and comments in the future.
