Converting from Blogger to Wordpress
Previously this blog had been on the Blogger platform. Blogger has been fairly easy to use, but there were some areas that Blogger wasn’t satisfactory:
1. Category.  Blogger does not allow me categorize my posts. This is actually turning out to be an important feature for me because I am covering several different topics, aimed at completely different audience, here. There are actually several ways to do this (this post from about.com gave a nice summary on how to do this), but none of them seems like a permanent solution to me.
2. Trackback abilities. Blogger doesn’t allow for trackback.
3. More control. I’d like to be in complete control of how my blog pages look like. Blogger is fairly good in this respect, but it doesn’t yet allow complete control.
I decided to install and run Wordpress on my website because that would allow me to accomplish all of the above. Below I’ll talk about how the process went:
Installation
The installation process was fairly painless. Simply following the directions got the job done.
Template/Presentation customization
Selecting a template actually took quite a bit of time. I tried out several templates, but eventually decided to use the default one and then go from there. To customize the template, you’ll need to have a basic understanding of PHP.Â
One important thing you should keep in mind if you are doing this is always make sure you have a backup copy of the original template file. Otherwise, it’s impossible to undo something if changes you made goes wrong — and often all you’ll get is a PHP error message, which could be entirely useless in debugging.Â
Import
Importing previous posts from Blogger actually gave me some problems. After some experimentation, I found that it was due to the fact that I had modified the default Blogger template quite a bit, and that seemed to have confused the Wordpress import program. Once I switched the Blogger template to the default one, the import process went ok.
There were some issues with the body text of the posts. In many (but not all) of the posts, the second paragraph would be joined together with the first paragraph. So, I had to manually go through each post to add the <p> tag in. That took some time.
A third thing I had to do is to make sure all the image calls are correct, as the paths to the images have now changed. This was a fairly easy task, as I had images in only a handful of my posts.
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