Spontaneous ∂erivation

Photography: Dlade

I wanted to get this article out so anyone who doesn’t have a blog yet can get rolling with a little advice on that very basic of questions: where should I blog?

The big three these days are Blogger, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

Here’s a run-down of their pros and cons.

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When I moved from Beta Blogger to Wordpress, I also switched domains¹.

This brought pain in two forms:

• broken backlinks from other sites, which isn’t good, and
• search engine penalties for duplicate content.

Neither were easily resolvable because of the differences between Wordpress and Blogger, and because Blogger is no more a real hosting solution than LiveJournal is.

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Out of the box, a Wordpress install is missing key features that even Beta Blogger had. Things like comment previews. Tag editing. Being able to redirect your site feed to Feedburner. Little things like that.

You could spend hours trying to find all the right plugins.

To keep you from spending time like I did, so that you can get down to the business of blogging in comfort, here’s my suggested list of:

• 6 Plugins you need
• 6 Plugins that show off Wordpress
• 6 More plugins

Click here to read more »

Photography: Plutor

There are a few things you want to set up before switching your domain over. Actually quite a few. We’ll cover two in this post, with the third (choosing plugins) in the next in this series.

The two for today:

• Importing your Beta Blogger posts properly with new Wordpress semantics, and
• Updating your theme from Beta Blogger to Wordpress.

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Photography: Clav

Because my move from Beta Blogger to my own Wordpress site was so painful, I’ve decided to put together a series about how to get oneself moved from Beta Blogger to a self-hosted Wordpress installation, with relatively little damage (eventually) to page rank and external links, and probably less pain. Probably.

I hope this information is useful to somebody, so that my productivity hit was not in vain.

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It’s not that I don’t want to, but because I’ve found that it’s almost always been more fruitful to wait for the dragon boat race to resolve itself.

Nobody makes it easy to move from one blog to any other, and in particular it gets worse the more experience you have. Not even Wordpress’s Blogger import is enough.

So here are the Big Three, problems I’ve run up against when considering a move to Wordpress, and that I hope Wordpress resolves at some point.

And, in the interests of being fair, I will also list the Other Big Three, problems that have made me even consider moving away from Blogger to Wordpress.

Photography: nzphotopro1

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Let me try.

It is indeed fixed.

But I like Flickr better.

We’ll see.