This may be off topic, but for current bloggers or those who are thinking of creating their own blog, I’ll briefly go over how I went about setting it up.
Choose a Platform
I first started out on Blogger because it was linked to Google, but unfortunately, there were many shortfalls which made customising the look and feel of the blog very difficult. After some testimonies and research, it seemed like WordPress.org was the way to go.
Do note that WordPress.com and WordPress.org are different. WordPress.org requires a hosting service to run.
Here’s an article that weighs the pros, cons and other things to consider.
Choose a Host
There are two options here. Free or paid service.
Free is good because it’s.. free, but too many restrictions for me. I like to be able to customize and make modifications which led me to a hosted service.
Free recommended host: www.110mb.com
It’s not as fast as regular websites, but for 5GB disk space with 300GB monthly bandwidth, it does a great job. If you require MySQL database, I think a one time fee of $5 is required.
Other free hosting can be found at here.
Cheap hosting: www.strikedata.com
Good thing about Strikedata is that the monthly rate is essentially the same as the annual rate. i.e you can pay $3 per month or one time payment of $36. Other places would charge an annual $36 or a monthly fee of $5. This is the only place I found that has a flexible contract.
They also offer cpanel so that installation of blogs and file management is very simple.
(Enter a “25OFF” for 25% off the total price)
Installing WordPress
Follow this link for a detailed view of how to install Wordpress. Install instructions.
Choose Your Theme
You’ve gone through all the hard work and now it’s just a matter of choosing your theme and customizing it to make it look snazzy.
Many themes available for download here.
Importing From Blogger
Wordpress has now made things so much simpler for Blogger users. With just the press of a button from the Manage menu, click import, select Blogger and all Blogger posts and comments are imported automatically. It maintains all the same links, images, comment dates, times etc. Makes moving so much simpler.
Update Formatting
From the Blogger import, you will have to clean up and neaten your posts again. The headers, font, etc may have lost its original formatting. Also, you will need to remember to update your links if you made a reference to it in your posts. This will probably be the most time consuming part.
Update Your Domain
Now that WordPress is set up and all the content from Blogger has been imported, it’s time to switch the domain name (if you already have one). Update the DNS on your domain provider to point to your paid hosted service. Best to do this once you have everything working otherwise people will visit an incomplete site.
Update Feedburner
For users of Feedburner, it’s vital that you don’t edit your feed address. That is, keep your http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogname the same. If you have a new domain URL or server address, you only want to modify the Original feed. This will ensure the transfer is transparent and your readers will not know. Change the feed address, and you’ll lose all your readers.
I ran into an issue where I get a “The domain “www.oldschoolvalue.com” does not seem to exist” error when I entered the new address into the Original Feed. This I found is a result of two possibilities.
- After you update the DNS to point to your new host, the DNS cache has to be refreshed by Google/Feedburner.
- After pointing the DNS, although the site is working with the new URL, it may still be in the propagating stage and will take approximately 24-72 hours for the feed to be recognised.
Now that the feed has been updated properly, it seemed like number 2 was the issue.
Post a Final Post On Your Old Blogger
Make a final post to inform people that the blog has moved. Google may continue to direct people to the old site for a day or so.
