Blogger To Wordpress Migration: Diary 3

My Blogger to Wordpress migration diary - part 3. Okay, so you’ve read the first part of my diary of migrating from blogger to wordpress in horror. Then you followed as I told about choosing and purchasing my domain in the second part. Here I continue my diary of the migration process and show you what happened in the days closely following the start of the wordpress site.

well, I felt like it did, anyway.

Right after the blog migration

After the actual migration, when all 41 articles were displayed on the new site, I realised that not all of my widgets had co-operated and come over. Added to this, the internal links I’d put on my articles all led to posts which no longer existed. Forget the pictures! They just went totally berserk and anarchic on me. They stood where they wanted. The ones I wanted in the middle remained on one side, and the ones I decided were going on the left, just didn’t want to stand still. There may’ve been an easy way to sort them out (isn’t there always?), but in my state of tech and coding idiocy, I didn’t know about it. It dawned on me that the only thing I didn't have to do was re-write the posts. All the links, images and heading fonts had to be changed. It was time to stop panicking and shouting inside my head, and work my fingers until they hurt - literally! It was then I made the following:

Note to self: start a blog from scratch. Never migrate from a different platform!

The only great thing about this sad situation was the fact that all the images were mine and I could easily find them again. The solution I came up with was to reload the whole bulk of them onto my new Wordpress site. If you’re familiar with this site, you’ll know that most of the articles are about home improvement, interior design and our extreme home makeover. This means lots of images per article, let alone the entire blog.  

Wordpress image-optimising system
When I started this impossible upload, I found a great thing about a sad situation. Wordpress has the best system for optimising pictures on your blog: You can choose where people are directed when they click on your image in a search result page. You can give each picture a name, an alt tag and a description. You can even edit  them while uploading each individual one to your post. As Blogger doesn’t allow alt tags or picture description, I found this Wordpress element a revelation! This meant that the task of uploading hundreds of pictures again was made a whole lot better by the fact that I could now optimise the pictures fully and effectively.

Once the images all had their places and were fully re-saved (now on my new blog’s very own library) I could easily view them, their details, and edit them - all from my dashboard! I still wanted to rip my hair out though, as my pages were all showing up as clickable links. I’d write a nice intro to my pages so that I could include some key words, but mainly to explain what they were to my readers who chanced upon them. Nothing I did worked. Hours were spent in vain trying to figure out things I had no idea about. (Why didn't I use the free help that came with the live chat set up by my blog's hosting platform? I was too busy panicking to think straight.)

My blog migration guy dumped me

After a few days, the person who migrated the blog understandably said he wasn’t going to spend any more time on it. I hadn’t paid him the world, so I wasn’t surprised. I was then left on my own to figure out how the side bars worked, how to edit my posts and pictures and how on earth to put some blogging directories' widgets on the blog. These all may sound easy to you, because you may have been with Wordpress for ages and know exactly what to do. For me, it was a gigantic task. However, just like the messy images, him quitting on me was a blessing in disguise.
I figured out on my own that the pages had been migrated, but not ‘Published’. On Blogger, I’d write a post, then ‘publish’ it. On wordpress I was trying to ‘Update’ the pages after editing them, without first ‘Publishing’ them. Once I gave myself a hard kick, the editing and republishing seemed to move a lot faster.

Another Wordpress wonder of wonders!
After 3 weeks, I’d edited all the posts and pages, plus all the images. While doing this I found another Wordpress wonder of wonders: You can actually change the url of your post! If your post's heading is too long, you can simply edit the url to say something shorter and more search-engine friendly.

With all the editing done, the hard part was over, but I still had all the most important jobs to figure out: How to make sure my categories, keywords and tags were search-engine friendly.

My very stop therefore, was to figure out how on earth my Blogger tags had come out as categories on Wordpress, and what I could do about it since there were about a hundred of them.

If you're thinking about starting your own wordpress blog, please use the comment box below to let me know if you have any questions. I have confidence you can do it. As I said before, starting one from scratch is much easier than going the way I did and migrating a blog. If you're interested in Blogger tutorials  I have a fantastic page of them on this blog. As always, thanks for visiting A Blogger's Books. Please share this post with someone else, or on your favourite networking sites.


BTW, my WP blogging platform is doing some offers on domains at the moment. Visit the link below to see what could be yours.