Converted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress
Well I did it. I actually really liked using Blogger, and I had finally gotten my blog set up the way I liked. However, I just wanted a little more. I evaluated a couple of different solutions (including Subtext, which I use on my personal blog), and I decided to go with WordPress (the software, not the hosted service).
First off, I wanted to be able to have a little more control over some SEO aspects of my blog, such as using a robots.txt. The all in one SEO pack Wordpress plug-in seems to handle many of my requirements. Unlike Blogger, a lot of the non-content pages won’t get indexed now (a good thing). See “Avoiding duplicate content with your site” for more information.
I also wanted to use the Apache mod_rewrite functionality, which is really an amazing tool. For example, I’m doing 301 redirects on all of the old Blogger archive pages, to the equivalent Wordpress archive URL’s.
RewriteRule ^([\d]{4})_([\d]{2})_[\d]{2}_archive.html$ /$1/$2 [R=301,L]
I also set up the Google Analtyics Plugin, which sets up some pretty neat tracking features. It’s even supposed to track outgoing links, but it isn’t working for me for some reason. I’ll be checking with the author.
Overall, I’m very happy with the Wordpress platform. It’s very simple and simply works like I would expect. Since it’s one of the most popular blogging platforms, I know that support is just a Google away, and bugs shouldn’t stay around too long. I also know that I can easily extend its functionality, or at least add content.
I’m hosting it on my dedicated server under Xampp. Installation of Apache, MySql, and Wordpress couldn’t be easier. In fact, I had it up and running in about 10 minutes. The performance seems pretty good compared to Blogger. There are a lot less files being downloaded, which should really help. I also plan to enable gzip compression for some more speed, and I would like to get a caching plugin to avoid constant page regeneration.
Let me know what you think of the new site, and my new theme!
PS. Sorry to my RSS subscribers. When I switched to Wordpress, the RSS feed shows the posts as all being new.
Aaron D. Campbell said,
Wrote on April 28, 2008 @ 9:18 am
I’m the developer of the Google Analytics plugin that you’re using. A new version was uploaded to the repository this weekend, which fixes the problem people were having with tracking outgoing links when using the newer Google code (ga.js). I’m glad to hear that your transition has been fairly easy!
Jon Wise said,
Wrote on April 28, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
Yes! Isn’t WordPress way better?! Blogger had promise, but its like Google abandoned it a year ago and haven’t bothered to try to keep up with WordPress (or the others.)
I too like not having to worry about my CMS system (and the frequent WordPress upgrades actually piss me off a bit) but the features are SO worth it.
Plus you get more geek points for not using Blogger
Aaron D. Campbell said,
Wrote on April 29, 2008 @ 4:02 pm
I’m the writer of the Google Analytics plugin. At the time you wrote this, a new version was in the works that fixed a problem with tracking outgoing links while using the newer analytics code (ga.js vs urchin.js). The new version is in the wordpress.org repository now. Please upgrade and let me know how it works.
Diucliply said,
Wrote on November 7, 2008 @ 10:16 pm
god site. Continue also
Errodooptiord said,
Wrote on November 9, 2008 @ 12:34 am
Hello, for you good site! Interesting design
Assautvah said,
Wrote on February 9, 2009 @ 8:31 pm
Nice template. Where can i download it?