My Journey from Blogger to WordPress and almost back again
At last I am moving my Blogger posts across to WordPress and amalgamating them into one blog instead of two. I had planned to do this several weeks ago but have been busy with some consulting and with our ecommerce web sites. I have enjoyed using Google Blogger and found it very easy to use. In comparison with my limited experience to date, WordPress is more difficult though much more powerful. There are so many plugins for WordPress that unless you are careful you can end up installing lots of stuff you will never ever use. But isn’t it great to have the range available? Though one thing concerns me is how well tested those plugins are, especially with each other? What do I mean by that? If you check out the great WordPress site then you will find 5,583 plugins! I haven’t yet looked into the software architecture behind WordPress but know that many great software engineers have, but my concern is that even if each of those 5,583 plugins works in isolation – do they still work when installed with any number of the other plugins? The number of permutations and combinations would be staggering and so no doubt there are some incompatibilities as there are with any complex piece of software. Considering the number of WordPress sites and articles out there I think it is safe to assume that the system is quite robust. I have tried to select plugins I think I will use, we will see over time just those I do use and those I do not. There are also a great range of free templates/themes for WordPress which again adds to its almost irresistible appeal as a blogging and simple website platform. For this blog, I am still deciding which theme to use but to start I used one of the Dream Templates but am now trying the freely available ones. Expect the theme here to change a few times over the next few weeks until I settle on one that suits. Let’s get back to the “Journey from Blogger to WordPress and almost back again!”. I tried importing my old blogs directly into WordPress but no matter what I tried, the import simply did not happen. It would stop at the first post, and I never found out why. I read lots of websites and blogs but couldn’t find an answer that actually worked for me. I even tried exporting my Blogger posts to XML, but then couldn’t find a neat way to import them back into WordPress! I made a suggestion to WordPress on their site and noticed a few others had the same problem so I was comforted that I wasn’t alone in these problems. So now I am resorting to selectively copying and rewriting my old blog posts into this blog. Fortunately, as I only have a few dozen posts in the old blogs. At that point, I almost stopped with WordPress in fact, but kept reading glowing reports and so went on. Because as simple as it is to use, Blogger just doesn’t offer the same range of solutions, and also doesn’t appear to rank as well in the Search Engines as WordPress and I have my own simple example of that. I conducted an accidental test of WordPress SEO recently. Accidental because I wasn’t intending on conducting a test, I just got delayed in moving my blogs across. So what happened? My previous blogs: my Internet Blog and my Career Blog were started early in 2009. Both were started as a trial, in fact the career blog was started to spread the word about some jobs with some people I knew from a previous employer, but one thing lead to another and so the blog grew over time. Both those blogs have a number of articles, some good, some not so good (I can say that, I wrote them). But what about their Alexa rank? Well as I write this, the Career Blog has an Alexa rank of 1,804,010 and my Internet Blog a rank of 1,827,209. Those rankings for two new and relatively small blogs are fine. But what about this blog? Well, today as I write this, the first real post for it, this blog today has a rank of 878,237 yet has only a few posts in it. How can that happen? How do you get a site to the top one million with almost no content? Yes, there is traffic that comes here via other links but not that many but maybe they all use the Alexa toolbar? Is it WordPress? Is it the fact that I also installed Joomla on the side to test out, or is it the fact that I hosted it at a quality host, HostGator? Is it all three? To be honest, I do not know, but will keep investigating and when I find out will write about it. WordPress it is then for this blog, from all accounts the best blogging platform available and even not bad as a simple to medium Content Management System, though not as sophisticated as Joomla or Drupal. So far I have spent only a little time with Joomla and I liked it. I was able to get things done very quickly without having to search through the 5,583 plugins. But, as I am new to both I will keep an open mind because millions of WordPress users can’t be wrong. One article I came across somewhere out there, suggested that the best combination was Joomla for your main site, with a WordPress blog on the side. Over time I will test that combination out, and Drupal appeals as well. Time will tell which I use more. All three are great for different jobs. Here are some good articles I came across while investigating WordPress, Joomla and Drupal:
Until next time Owen |
