Upgrading the blog, downgrading my lifespan

If there’s anthing as inevitable as a first post that says “Welcome to my blog“, it’s a subsequent post railing about converting to a better blogging program. This is one of those. Mind the bile…

As you can see, my conversion from Blogger to WordPress is done. Mostly.

And it was as easy as… well, say, learning Sanskrit, or mastering the Japanese tea ceremony.

Don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress, but those who say it’s a simple switch are full of it. You need to learn little bits of MySQL, php, UNIX, and begging for help. I’ve worked online for 10 years without having to learn any but the last item on that list.

Why did I make the change? Well, it started not long after I started using Blogger, when I was unable to display a bit of HTML code on a page. Joe Clark got the ball rolling in the comments with “Blogger sucks for HTML; Why aren’t you using WordPress?” And of course I had to learn WordPress to take over Tod Maffin’s InsideTheCBC.com site, so I could clearly see the advantages.

But the main impetus came from the regular inability of Blogger to talk to my host site, NetFirms. About once a week, I’d try publishing a Blogger post and find it unable to communicate with my site at www.gorbould.com. Worse, it would always happen when my wife wanted to update her kindergarten class blog at www.mscook.com, hosted on the same server. I’d get a “Broken Pipe” error (and I thought the internet was made of tubes!)

Of course, I should have known this would be a bigger problem than just which software I was using.

Once I had downloaded and installed WordPress, I figured out the basics of setting up a database (you only have to change a couple of settings), then tried to import my Blogger content. WordPress 2.0 has a nifty Import tool to handle this… if it can talk to Blogger. Which I’ve just finished explaining was a problem. Here also: I’d get about three quarters of the way through the import, and it would time out, and I’d have to start from scratch.

I tried getting support on the WP forums, but it turned out just to be a matter of patience and luck. After perhaps 50 attempts, it imported my content. Most of it, anyhow. For some reason, only September files were imported, and older ones were skipped. In the end I worked around that problem by changing the dates on my old files (thanks, GreaseMonkey!) to September, then importing them and changing the dates back again. Ugly, but it worked. I had to resize most of my large images, but otherwise the import of content and comments worked all right in the end.

Problem solved? Hardly. The next trick was to change my links to the same “pretty permalinks” structure used on Blogger (e.g. www.gorbould.com/year/month/my-post-title.html) By default, WP just gives them numbers, which isn’t as readable by people or search engines. Changing it was supposed to be a snap, but wasn’t. You need to learn about great mysteries such as .htaccess files, chmod permissions, mod overwrite and flibbertygibbetybibbledyboo. Still didn’t work, despite help from the WP forum folks, NetFirms support, and the extremely helpful Paul C. at CBC.ca.

In the end, both Netfirms and WP sources told me a simple, ugly truth: NetFirms doesn’t really support pretty permalinks. The best you can do is to use them with “index.php” inserted in the URLs. Not terrible, but not what I want. More to the point, it means there’s no way I can use the same URLs as my old blog entries, thereby screwing up my existing traffic.

Whatever. I learn more Sankrit and figure out how to redirect people from those posts, even if I have to create 52 redirects to do it. But suffice it to say that I won’t be recommending NetFirms to anyone, and I won’t be recommending WordPress to anyone who isn’t technically inclined.

So, I still have a lot of work to do.

• I need to figure out those redirects.
• I need to install some of the whiz-bang WP widgets I’ve been reading about (and using on Tod’s blog.)
• I need to figure out how to get everyone using my old RSS feed onto the new one.
• The search engine is screwy - it doesn’t seem to work when it isn’t on the homepage.
• And I need to finish customizing my template, completing my blogroll, etc.

If anyone out there has advice on such things, please let me know. If anyone is still checking my blog after being so long neglected, that is. If so, well, thanks.

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-07-2006 | 12:10 AM
Posted in: Blogging