I have been telling you all for a bit, that I was going to talk about my big move from Blogger to Wordpress. Not only that but why I moved, some tips and tricks and so on. Well the day is finally here. I use Show in a Box and Vpip and most of what I talk about pertains to that. The video is a screencast I did that helps explain a few things about getting you vlog to work right after you move. But the real meat of the process is below.
So you wanna move your Vlog from Blogger to Wordpress? The first question you should ask yourself is why? I mean it, why do you want to change? Because after moving my vlog, I can tell you its not just a straight copy and paste kind of thing. Its gonna to take some work, things are going to go wrong. So if you are moving it, just to move itit may not be the right thing to do.
I moved because I wanted more control over how my videos played on my site, I wanted my vlog site to look more like a real website and I wanted to use Show in a Box and Vpip the way they were meant to be used. I wanted to be able to offer different feeds and to give people choice in how they see my videos. So basicly I wanted more choice.
Now if you still want to move, here are some of the things I found out, went through, etc. Now a blog move is pretty easy, text, links etc will come over fine. Its when you have media, some scripts, even some HTML that are associated with your media, in my case videos, that is when things get a bit wonky. I will do my best to explain everything.
I am going to assume that you have already got your domain name and hosting and have already put Wordpress on your site. If not, check out the tutorials on Show in a Box. They do a good job of getting you to that point. Now the first thing you are going to want to do after that is import your vlog from Blogger and luckly Wordpress makes this handy, dandy importer. There is just one problemits doesnt work with the new version of Blogger, (maybe, I have heard a few different reports but from what I can see, what I am going to explain is what most of you will have to do, at the moment anyway). Yes thats right, it says you can but you cant. There is a work-around though. You will need to go to Wordpress.com and create a free blog account. (Yes I am aware that Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are by the same group, Wordpress.com has fixed the bug) After you have created you free wordpress.com account, import your blogger blog. This is pretty straight forward, you will see the status of your blog importing. Once that is done, you then want to Export your new blog from Wordpress. This creates an XML file that you will save to your desktop, once that is done, go back to your wordpress blog you have on your own domain and select import and then select the import a Wordpress blog. After that is done, you will now have your old vlog on your new site.
Now from here you can do a couple of things, you can select a brand new theme from the many themes that are out there. Make sure they are widget friendly though. Or you can select the Show in a Box themes that have a few different options, these are all widget ready. Its up to you, but why not use the Show in the Box stuff? Its fun! Now if you are wondering how you get these custom themes and widgets into your new site, get an FTP program, filezilla is good for the PC, and Cyberduck for the Mac. Just get one, you will need it, trust me. Again getting a theme is fairly straight forward. If you pick a pre-designed theme, the next stuff is pretty easy. If you want to really tweak out the site, visit the Show in a Box forums for help, if you dont know CSS, HTML, etc. (I dont know a lot myself, I asked for a lot of help.
Ok, the next part is best explained by my screencast, so check it out now.
See how easy all this is! Its going to take you a while to get all of your media to work like you want it. It took me about a week, of course I had over 2 ½ years of posts and video to work on. Its gonna take some time, it just will. Ok, thats about it for now. Yes there is a lot more you can do, create pages, etc. But this I think is a good start and how to do those things are fairly easy to do.
So to sum up, if you wanna move your blog from blogger to a self hosted Wordpress site, you will need the following.
Your own domain name and a web hosting plan
Wordpress.org software
Show in a Box (optional)
An FTP client
Lots of patience
I cant stress the last one enough. I hope you all found this useful and till next time.later, gator!
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