Posts for the 'wordpress widgets' Category

These are the 12 steps I applied to convert, move or migrate blog from Blogger to Wordpress:

1. First and foremost, know the benefits of converting your blog from Blogger to Wordpress. See if the benefits worth the conversion for your blog.
2. If you’ve decided to convert your blog or go for Wordpress, signup to have one. If you host your own blog, install the Wordpress blog into a directory other than your existing blog through the Fantastico feature of your web host. If you opt to install Wordpress manually, here is the Wordpress installation guide.
3. After installation, sign in and access your Wordpress admin page. Select the Wordpress template you prefer. The popular templates are those with 2-column and 3-column designs. But, there are so many Wordpress themes or templates that will surely capture your heart.
4. Choose the Wordpress widgets you love. Popular Wordpress widgets include Popular Posts, Recent posts, Recent Comments, Related Posts, Top Commentators, and also the money making widgets. These are only few of the Wordpress widgets that attract readers and make them navigate or participate in your blog discussions.
5. Identify the Wordpress widgets and other blog sections you wanted to appear in your blog. Map these widgets and blog sections in your Wordpress template.
6. Edit the Wordpress template to implement the widgets and other sections in your Wordpress blog. Choose the URL structure your prefer as discussed in my previous post, Top 5 Reasons to Convert Your Blog From Blogger to Wordpress. Test if your final template and design are working properly by clicking the links or navigating it.
7. Before you may import your Blogger blog posts with externally-hosted Wordpress blog, edit first the blogger.php file in /wp-admin/import/. Delete the “2″ in www2.blogger.com.
8. Convert your self-hosted Blogger blog into blogspot in Blogger Admin Settings with any available name. Better do it during the non-peak hours of your blog. When there are less visitors accessing your blog. Then, click Formatting in the Blogger Setting and change the post timestamp into mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM, the first option in drop-down menu. After that, click Archiving and set Archive Frequency to “monthly”. Then, import your Blogger blog posts and comments through the import link in your Wordpress blog Admin page. After importing, immediately convert your blogspot blog to its original state. This will minimize the inaccessibility of your original blog.
9. Test your Wordpress blog again but having your own blog posts. Don’t forget to delete the sample post if you’ve not yet done so. Navigate your blog to ensure that everything is fine.
10. If all are OK, backup your old Blogger blog and the new Wordpress blog. Then, edit your Wordpress blog base URL at Options in Admin page. Replace it with your original blog URL, either root or subdirectory. Here’s the details of moving Wordpress blog to another directory.
11. If you original blog is in subdirectory, just change the name of that directory with a new one. Then, rename your Wordpress blog directory with your original blog directory. Then, type your blog URL in your web browser address window. You must be directed to your Wordpress blog.If your original blog is in the root directory, you need to delete your original blog files. To minimize or prevent your original blog being inaccessible, implement a temporary redirection to your Wordpress blog directory prior to deletion. Then, upload your Wordpress blog to the root directory where your original blog is located.
12. Now, type your original blog URL in your web browser address bar and your Wordpress blog should appear. If everything is fine, you may delete or disable your Blogger blog permanently. Search engine robot access to your blog backup directory in your server must be disallowed using robots.txt to prevent duplicate content.

That’s it…Enjoy your Wordpress blog!

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I am very sorry for the recent instability of my blog. This was because I converted my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. I was really impressed by Wordpress. To give you some ideas, I’ll share to you in series why I prefer Wordpress to Blogger, how I converted my blog and how I resolved the problems I encountered during and after the conversion.

Now, here are the top 5 reasons I migrated my blog from Blogger to Wordpress:

As basis of my comparison, you have to take note that I am hosting my blog at HostMonster. Hence, I am using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program and blog admin panel for publishing, uploading and editing.

1. Plugins or Blog Widgets. Wordpress has more plugins or widgets available for bloggers. Wordpress has several choices of interactive or sociable widgets or plugins such as top commentators, popular posts, related posts, recent posts, recent comments and many more. Widgets in Wordpress seemed to be endless or bottomless. In Blogger, I can’t find a widget or plugin for top commentators and popular posts. These could be provided by Blogger or other developers in the future, though.
2. Publishing or Editing Blog Posts. In Wordpress, publishing a new or edited post is far faster than Blogger. Unlike Blogger, Wordpress does not republish all blog entries everytime you publish a new post or edit an old post. It simply saves or upload the new or edited entry. If you have a numerous blog entries, it will take time for Blogger to update your blog. It will even encounter an uploading error during peak hours when many bloggers are updating their blogs.
3. URL Structure Options. In Wordpress, there are several options of URL structure to choose from while there’s only one in Blogger, i.e. http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/yyyy/mm/post-name(.html, .htm, .php, .asp, etc.). In Wordpress, you may choose either of the following URL structures:
   • Default:
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/?p=123
   • Date and name based:
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/2007/10/30/post-name/Numeric:
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/archives/123
   • Custom:
     You may customize your blog URL by placing after your blog directory, each of the following codes in any order in between slash and you may add file extension at the end like .html, .htm, .php, and .asp.

   Codes:
   %year% = year posted in 4 digits
   %monthnum% = month posted in 2 digits
   %day% = day posted in 2 digits
   %postname% = full post title with dash as space
   %post_id% = post sequence number

   • Examples:
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/%postname%/
     http://your-blog-domain-and-directory/%post_id%
4. TrackBack capability. Wordpress has the ability to track back other blogs’ link juice to your blog with an excerpts or portion of texts of its posts. Likewise, your backlinks to other Wordpress blogs are easily detected by its TrackBack feature. Blogger has only a simple backlinks feature that list the post title with links to all other blogs’ posts linking to it. However, there is a third-party site that offer a Weblog Commenting and TrackBack Tool for Blogger and other blog software, i.e. the Haloscan. But, I did not explore this tool.
5. Popular Blogs are Using Wordpress. Most of the popular blogs I like are using Wordpress. Some of them are MattCutss.com/blog, Problogger.net, JohnChow.com, copyblogger.com, and StevePavlina.com. Matt Cutts, Senior Engineer for Google Search, said in Wordpress Conference that it is guaranteed to be crawlable if you use Wordpress. Though there are also many popular blogs in Blogger, Wordpress blogs appeared to be more popular.

As to the other points of comparison of Blogger and Wordpress like themes, indexing and HTML or blog template editing, I found them even. Both Blogger and Wordpress have many templates to choose from their respective sites and also from third-party sites. And based on many bloggers’ experience, search engines index the new posts of these blog platforms at a reasonable time. Another thing, both template can be easily edited, with knowledge of HTML basics.

With the reasons above, I have converted my blog. Though I’ve encountered some problems, I managed to resolve them and now, I am enjoying the benefits of Wordpress blog. I hope this post can help you decide whether you convert or migrate your blog from Blogger to Wordpress or not.

For more comparisons of Blogger and Wordpress, here are the links from some popular blogs:
Blogger vs. Wordpress.com Comparison Chart
Which Blog Service is the best? Wordpress vs Blogger vs LiveJournal
Blogger vs. Wordpress Read more »

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