Moving from Blogger to WordPress

For more than four years now I’ve been running this blog with Blogger. Today I’ve finished the bulk of the work involved in moving to WordPress. It might be a few days before all the loose ends are tied up.

The limitations of Blogger:

Blogger isn’t a bad blog tool, but it’s simply not advanced enough to run a large, optimized website. I was using Blogger with a custom template to publish via SFTP to brandonstaggs.com. It worked alright, this setup was missing key features:

  • Categories. I wanted categories, and Blogger couldn’t do that for me.
  • On-site installation. I couldn’t run Blogger with PHP and mySQL on my own server for maximum control.
  • Content management. Blogger can’t be used to manage an entire website unless the entire website is just blog posts. This forced me to use a combination of Dreamweaver and custom templates with Blogger, and it was always a pain to update content.

The advantages of WordPress

Besides Blogger not doing enough, WordPress gives me more stuff I want:

  • Content management. WordPress can be used to run an entire website including pages that are not necessarily blog posts.
  • Permalink control.
  • Plugins. WordPress has lots of plugins that appear to be quite useful. I’m already using the All-in-one Search Engine Optimization Pack plugin to fix what I view as deficiencies in WordPress page titles, etc.
  • More options in templates. Yuep, I’m a programmer. I like options. Give me enough rope to hang myself and I’ll see how long I can hold my breath.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress is a pain

At least it was for me. Here were my major problems:

  • Existing site with a boatload of individual pages that aren’t part of a CMS.
  • Blog posts on blogger with no titles. I had over 240 blog entries on Blogger. For whatever reason, be it templates or whatever, I never had the option of adding titles to my posts.
  • Blogger posts were published to website with SFTP, not a Blogspot page. WordPress offers no import function for Blogger entries that aren’t on Blogspot.
  • Blogger posts were only archived by month, not individual post.

What I did

  • Uploaded WordPress to my server in a test subdirectory so as not to disturb my existing site while doing the stuff.
  • Switched Blogger to post on Blogspot.
  • Tried to import. This bombed. As it turns out, WordPress imports by post. So it imported one huge post for each month because I still had Blogger set to archive by month only.
  • After much gnashing of teeth, wondering why my 240 posts imported to just under 50, I deleted my WordPress tables and started over. This time, I had Blogger post individual posts to Blogspot instead of only archiving by month. This worked.
  • Spent a day going through four years of blog posts to 1. Give them titles, 2. categorize them, and 3. Delete really embarrassing ones.
  • Manually “imported” my various non-blog pages (and I’m still not done) into WordPress.
  • Edited the .htaccess WordPress made to add a ton of redirects, so people coming to old page URLs would get forwarded to the new locations. Still not done with this — I need to forward all the old monthly archive pages to the new WordPress monthly archive pages. Oh fun!

So far, so good.

Patents Gone Wild

EBay in Patent Fight Over ‘Buy It Now’

“A small Virginia company in a patent fight with eBay Inc. asked a federal judge Tuesday to stop the online auction powerhouse from using its ‘Buy It Now’ feature allowing shoppers to buy items at a fixed price.”

And here I thought buying items at a fixed price was just the way most stores sell things! I never knew it was such a novel concept that someone could actually file a patent on it.

Obviously, there’s some absurd obfuscation involved that some patent clerk thought was good enough for a filing. This is just like the ridiculous “One click buying” patent Amazon.com had — a company being granted ownership of a concept so utterly simple and obvious.

I’m all for intellectual property rights, but this is beyond absurd.

Understanding why Windows doesn’t make sense.

And why it actually does, eventually.

About 10 years ago I got a call from my mom.

Mom: “Brandon, I need your help. Your brother played a trick on me and now I can’t do anything on my computer.”

Me: “What do you mean you can’t do anything?”

Mom: “The place where the programs go is gone.”

I thought for a moment. She meant the task bar.

Me: “Is there a thin line at the bottom of the screen?”

Mom: (Checks) “Yes.”

Me: “Put your mouse pointer over that line. Click and pull it up.”

Mom: “Thank you! I was so worried I wouldn’t be able to do any work.”

My Mom isn’t dumb when it comes to computers. She is an expert using a word processor and designing documents. She can type a million words per minute, and back before Windows became useful, she used Wordperfect for DOS and had a portrait-oriented monitor and people paid her good money to type in and format documents and she knew five thousand different keyboard shortcuts for doing anything without a mouse.

But when she was new to Windows 95, she was a victim of “mouse twitching” – she accidentally hid the task bar in Windows 95 just by moving the mouse the wrong way with the button held down. Suddenly, her computer was completely useless and she had to make a long distance call to Hawaii to ask someone who might know how to fix it what to do. All because somebody thought it would be cool to let a user hide away their task bar just by clicking on it and dragging it down a few pixels.

The Old New Thing: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows, by Raymond Chen, chronicles these sorts of usability discoveries during the many years of Windows development at Microsoft. He also talks about why Windows is designed the way it is, from the inside-out. If you’re a developer, like me, who has to design software that people interact with, and frequently curse oddities in the Windows API, this book is something you should read. He explains why you have to click Start to turn off your computer, what a dumb idea it was to ask a user if they want to keep a “newer file” when installing a driver (even I never knew how to answer that one)… stuff like that. It belongs on your shelf next to Joel on Software.

Forum Software: vBulletin is better than phpBB

On Forum Software:

I like vBulletin.

I recently upgraded my SwordSearcher User Forum from phpBB to vBulletin, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the process. My phpBB board was getting hammered by spammers and administrating the board was just a major chore because of the way phpBB is set up.

Not so with vBulletin. Handling administrative tasks is just so much easier. This is definitely another example of “getting what you pay for.” Just because something’s free (as in phpBB) doesn’t mean it’s a good deal.