For a while now, I’ve been considering moving away from Blogger and transferring my blog to WordPress. As it stands, I have a Blogger account using a customised “old-style” Blogger template (no widgets and gadgets and fancy stuff) which uploads via SFTP to my site. Thing is, I’m now finding the lack of a few things such as “next” and “prev” page links, tag clouds, and so on a bit of a limitation these days.
I’ve installed WordPress and tried to import everything from Blogger, but because it’s an FTP blog, and it’s an “old style” template, WP says no. So I need to change my template to a “standard” Blogger template – which is a one-way change. Once you’ve done it, you can’t go back.
Then there’s the issue of images and permalinks. I’m not too worried about images (most are locally hosted or are on Flickr, so there shouldn’t be a problem), but permalinks will change.
Oh yes, and there’s the issue that it seems that WP will only import 999 Blogger posts. My Gaming Diary (which I also want to transfer over at some point) has some 2100 posts. On top of that, there’s the RSS feed URL which may change. Hmm.
And, of course, I’m going to have to heavily modify a WP template if I want it to integrate into my site in the same way my current blog does. And WP templates are more cumbersome than Blogger ones, and that took long enough.
Decisions, decisions!
Another thing to consider is the continual updates you have to install to avoid your blog getting haxed, which is a bit annoying.
Then again, most of the hacks are aimed at new whistles and bells, so you could just hunker down with a “not the blooding edge” version and let the l33t kiddies get hacked.
As far as importing – as you are in charge of your RSS system, why not use WordPress’s “import from an rss feed” feature?
Because WordPress’s “import from an rss feed” feature doesn’t work 🙁