Last year, when I moved to Blogger, my decision was influenced by:
- Staying with a cloud provider for the blog service
- Ability to install plugins
Now WordPress.com does not allow you to install plugins unless you are really big, and therefore Blogger made sense. However, I have found Blogger to be very limiting and every time I looked at the WordPress plugin ecosystem, I found myself yearning for all that richness. Finally, yesterday evening, I set up a box in the sky, installed WordPress, added the plugins I wanted and imported my blog from Blogger.
What went well:
- Installation was a breeze – took me less than 10 minutes to get WP up and running on a bare Ubuntu box (and I am a newbie to LAMP)
- Plugins – you are spoilt for choice here, and the time taken was mostly in trying out various plugins and selecting which one to use for a specific functionality.
- Import went off without a hitch, except that it kept throwing an error for one of the posts (the migration from Live to Blogger one)
- Bonus was that I was able to bring back all the comments I had lost on my older Live Space blog – they could not be imported to Blogger, but WordPress worked like a charm.
The only thing that did not work was that I could not find any simple way of retaining the permalinks – Blogger appends a random number after each post and short of entering that manually for each post, I can’t think of any other mechanism to retaining them. This is bad because it will break people’s bookmarks, but with the new scheme, I don’t think this will ever need changing hence.
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