journeytosamal.com
Well it appears that I’m about to take the plunge. The one that almost everyone does eventually.
I’ve been playing with WordPress all weekend to see if I could/would make the move. I set up a local server on my Mac to test everything and give me time to see how difficult this might be. To my surprise the most difficult part seems to be finding a theme that I like & at the same time is functional. There are lots of themes I like, and many that are very functional but getting the right combination has been more work than I anticipated. The other difficult part is yet to come. Evidently Blogger isn’t excited about you moving on and isn’t going to help you in that matter. I’ve found what I think are some good directions on what I need to do, but I am anticipating some issues.
Thinking I might want to go this route, I registered journeytosamal.com a few months back. In fact it’s been live since that time, but I have the url redirected to here (Blogger). So if you are one of those that comes here directly, now would be a good time to change that url in your bookmark.
I still need to get a host and upload the site, so I’m not sure of the timing of things. I don’t anticipate any new posts until this is complete. Thanks for hanging in there.
Congrats, Randy! You are doing the right thing.
If there is anything I can do to assist you, please let me know. I have no experience with Blogger, but can probably help with anything WP related.
Thanks, Bob. So far the Blogger content has transferred over without too many issues. I’m not sure about the move of the files I’ve been playing with on my computer though. I’m hoping I won’t have to reinstall WP on the server, and that I can just move what I have over. I think that’s how it should work.
I think I’ve found a hosting company for now (thanks, Dave!!). Going to check a few things with them tomorrow and if all is good, I’ll sign on with them.
As it appears you have already fund, ,ovng the data _from_ Blogger is a very simple transfer. To Google’s credit they make that easy.
One thing we hadn’t mentioend is what to do with the Blogger blog _after_ you get the new serice up and running to your satisfaction. I did a similar move years ago with one of my original blogs. I left the old blog ‘alive’ with a last post that redirects visitors to the new, ‘live’ blog. There’s pros and cons of ending the lif eof the old one n different ways, but in this case it appears leaving the old one in limbo worked best because I still get several visitors a day from the Blogger address … since it’s feeI lose nothing by having it there, plusit avoids the chance someone else would re-use the name.
Also, I don’t know if you use these guys but I recommend them .. price is right
They give very useful stats about who came, from where and what people were looking for and seem to be very reliable with an easy to understand reporting page:
http://my7.statcounter.com
Congrats Randy – I better go where I put a link to your site and change them too. AAAWWWW more work for me.
Hi Dave – thanks again for the host recommendation. I believe I’ll give them a try.
I do plan to leave the blogger site live and have it redirect. Hopefully, if I can follow the directions I have correctly, I can do that so this site is no longer indexed and the posts don’t show as dups in the search engines.
I’ve not used the stacounter before. I’ll look into it. I did have Google Dashboard Analytics set up, but I haven’t paid much attention to it lately, and can’t remember the code I had to insert for it. I’ll worry about that later.
Hi Ellen – you don’t need to worry about that. They should redirect without any problem.
BTW, and I meant to write you about this before, I REALLY appreciate you mentioning my blogs in the various places you do. I see increased traffic every time you do that.
Your interview in expatsinterviews was very nice. I enjoyed reading it and learning more about you and your husband. It’s quite the adventure you two have gone on. Very impressive and commendable. I hope you are still there when we visit next time (probably spring 2010) because we’d like to get together.
Randy,
Congrats, you’ll like WP. I use Bluehost, check them out, very happy with them.
Kevin
Thanks, Kevin. Looks like I got it up but I lost everything I had done but the theme
Well It shouldn’t be that hard to rebuild, I hope.
Like the new look. After using WP for a few weeks I’m sure you’ll be wondering why you didn’t make the switch earlier. A few tips (if you haven’t considered them already) to make it a bit more SE friendly -
install “all in one seo pack” plugin
change permalink structure to /%category%/%postname%/
add dagon sitemap
Always enjoy your posts.
Paul
Hi Highena – thanks for the comments and advice. I was just in the process of changing my permalinks to try to get my posts to forward. I’m having no luck with the forwarding, but I have gone to a straight /%postname%/ for now. That’s what is supposed to work with the forward. If I can’t get that to work, I’ll change the permalink again.
I’ll look into the other two plugins.
To Dave – thanks for the heads up on Statcounter. I’ve got it up and running, and even though I’ve only got a couple of days of info I can see that I actually prefer it to the Google Analytics that I was using before.
BTW I ended up using GoDaddy because they already had my domain registration and I had email set up there. They offered a fair/competitive price and good usage amounts. They also had a 2 month plan, so I’m not stuck with them if I’m not happy. Both the company you recommended and the one Kevin recommended were very highly regarded, from what I could gather. With all I needed to do with the blog transfer and setup, I just felt this was the easier route to go.