I spent a bit of time this evening shifting my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Why? Well, I have my own hosting service that I use, and I used to use blogger because it was an easy way to publish and control the posts. But blogger depends on FTP / SFTP if you use an external hosting service, which means it’s another service that I need to open up on my hosting box. Also, it’s another set of login / password credentials that I have to maintain. Now since my l/p information is stored in a database, which is actually hosted on a seperate SQL server, it just became too complex to change anything. This was fine as long as it worked…however, when I moved my hosting database to a different server, the hash key changed, and I can’t be bothered resetting the blogger password for the hosting service (phew!).

So for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t blogged. Well, technically I have, I just haven’t been able to publish anything. So I switched to blogger’s internal hosting, spent some time making sure all my posts were in the published state, and used the built in WordPress import function to bring them all in to WP. I’ve not changed the theme at all, because I’m a little lazy and I wanted to put more content up instead. Oh, by the way, blogger does not maintain the image files on their servers when you do your own hosting. They upload and link straight to your server. This means, when you move to wordpress, the images do not get imported into WP. Now, as long as the URL for the image files remains the same, everything is peachy. What I did to keep everything the same is tell WordPress to use the old blogger image directory as it’s own. So now they will still all be in the same place

So now I shouldn’t have as many problems with logins etc. as WordPress is publishing to the local file system (yay!). Plus it’s flexible, so I might get around to adding some more features…like plugging my photo gallery into this properly