Moving a Blog Really Sucks: New Look, New Format
Whew… Moving anything tends to suck, but moving a blog is, IMHO, right up there with moving to a new house or moving a cactus.
Well, this is it, I am done with good old Blogger. To tell the truth, I knew I needed to move this blog a few months ago but I knew that it was going to be a big job so, I did what any human being would do, I procrastinated. If there is anything that I have learned in my relatively short life, it is that procrastination only lasts until the unpleasant task you are avoiding become less unpleasant than the situation you are currently in. It had finally gotten to the point when moving 319 pages BY HAND from one system to another was easier than dealing with Blogger for ONE MORE DAY. That says alot about how difficult Blogger has gotten.
I have been modifying WordPress for my other sites and clients for about a year now. I was thoroughly impressed with how easy it was to manipulate and add on to.
Probably about half of you saw I was building a new blog for the past few weeks (Thank you, Technorati Tattle Tale). I want to make a shout out to Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots for alerting me to the Technorati issue and Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening for all her great WordPress tips.
You may notice that the comments are missing from the old posts. Never fear, I will be slowly adding those back in over the next few weeks. The fact of the matter is that my posts are only are half complete without all of the comments you guys leave. Thanks to everybody who stops by. Hopefully we will all enjoy this new format for This Garden Is Illegal.
I have wanted to head over to WordPress for the last couple of months, but I just can’t get myself to make the move. My first love Blogger has a hold on me. I see new the new, sexy WordPress layout and so want to make the move. Change is hard, but very often liberating. Its still scary, though.
So, when’s the blog-warming. I feel like I should have bought a plant with me or something.
It looks great Hanna and obviously opens up a few more doors for you than the ol’ Blogger platform. Can’t wait to see what else you do here.
Welcome to wordpress! you weren’t able to export all of your posts with comments intact and then just import then into wordpress? I was able to do that when I jumped ship from blogger to typepad, then typepad to wordpress.
Things are looking good!
Hey Hanna,
Great new look! I especially like how your masthead “pops” with the tomato.
What prompted the move?
–Robin (Bumblebee)
It looks great! Good luck with the new blog and with WordPress. I’ve been a fan of WordPress for a while now.
trey, Stuart & Patrick – Hey, thanks you guys! Looking forward to using WordPress.
Kelly – Supposedly you can do that, but about a few months ago I moved a Blogger blog to WordPress (much smaller one) and tried to use that feature and all it did was delete all the posts from the blogger admin (not good because moving posts embedded in HTML is even more of a pain than just copying and pasting from the admin). Then I heard a few other people commenting on it in a forum I hang out in, that it did the same thing to them. I think that feature got broken, at least for Blogger. I didn’t waant to risk retrying it with this blog as it would have been a disaster if that had happened with this blog.
Robin (Bumblebee) – For myself, Blogger was getting really annoying. The WYSIWYG (where you edit your post) is very broken. I’ve lost entire posts to a single HTML error as it will delete a post from the error down (which then got auto saved over as I tried to figure what the hell happened). The spell check will dismantle a post if the ALT name of your image is not in the dictionary. And uploading an image now rips up a nicely formatted post. And that’s just problems with the WYSIWYG. There have been lots of bugs since they “upgraded” and they only added to the problems from before, not helped. It has always been a longstanding problem for Blogger that their template interface is pifficult to use for people wanting to make advanced changes. It is indicative that for WordPress, things you do to make it better are called Plugins while in Blogger they are called hacks.
Don’t get me wrong. If you are not a tech oriented person, Blogger is a good format to be on as you don’t need to fuss much and you probably wouldn’t notice the problems with Blogger much as they only happen to people trying to do more advance things. But I work with websites for a living. WordPress gives me alot of room to play.
Ooh, I like the new space. I haven’t a clue what that plant was on your old blog space, but everyone recognizes a tomato, especially that juicy one at the top of your blog page.
I Love WordPress!
Seriously, you won’t be sorry your switched 🙂
I like the new design, very crisp and clean.
Very nice! I like the new layout and look.
hello 🙂 i like the new format. i’m a new reader and an obsessed gardener. i switched to wordpress some time back and i absolutely love it! so, good choice.
i also really like your blog, it’s cool and funny and not at all stuffy.
The first thing I noticed was the header, then the rest of the layout. Nice!!!!
I hope someplace in the sidebar you put a link to why your garden is illegal. I think I was reading it for over a year before I found out why you called it what you did.
And FWIW, I don’t like WYSIWYG in WordPress either. You can turn it off on your user profile. Since I’m only using 2.13 I suppose it could have improved, but last December I wiped out an entire post of Mary Ann Newcomer’s (Idahogardener.com) trying to fix something, because of that stupid feature.
Nice new look! I’ve been playing around with a WordPress blog for another purpose. Like some of the cool features offered better suited for the other purpose. For my simple blog, blogger seems to be quick & easy. That auto save or something does cause some timing delays as I’m creating a post. Haven’t lost anything yet though. Congratulations on the move.
Looks like you come through it okay. It looks good.
I recently moved from Blogger to WordPress and it went fairly smoothly. I’m really pleased with the latter.
I stopped by because my RSS feed hadn’t caught any updates lately. I like the new layout.