Advice for Transitioning off of Blogger | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Hello,

I did option one. It was relatively straight forward.  There's no problem with the RSS feed. If you are using Feedburner, leave the feed address the same. I also left the "original feed the same (even though it says change it if you move your original feed to a new domain). What I did change was in Blogger settings, you edit the blog address (to your new domain) AND you redirect from your old domain XXX.blogspot.com. You also have to do a DNS redirect from you old domain to your new domain with whoever you purchased your domain from (ie GoDaddy). If you are using GoDaddy, the hold process is very straight forward. Also, if you don't like Blogger commenting system, you can use Intense Debate. I think you can use Discus too, so you can add a 3rd-party commenting system without incident.

I hope this helps. Overall, I think the process (changing the feed details in Feedburner, doing the DNS redirect, and changing Blogger settings) might have taken 1.5 hours. I was very unfamiliar with the process.

In the future, I will likely switch to Wordpress. If you ultimately do this, then contact Money Beagle. He just went through this transition. I believe he said that he used Jesse to do the whole thing for him, and it was totally uneventful. I hope this helps.

I just did the migration last month.  I did most of it myself.  I consulted Eric @ Narrow Bridge a few times and he was more than helpful.

While you might be comfortable on Blogger, here are a few things to consider:

1) Unless something has changed, when you click the comment tab, that takes you to a Blogger.com page.  Anything you do at that point is done on the Blogger.com domain.  What does that mean?  Blogger gets the Alexa juice for anybody that has the toolbar installed.  When you go to Wordpress, your commenting platform is self-hosted, so you get the clicks.  It might be a small thing but I believe it adds up.

2) If you're using Feedburner to publish your feed, Wordpress has a couple easy plugins you can use (I use FeedSmith I think) where you just put your Feedburner address, and your RSS readers should be none the wiser.

3) I spent a lot of time working with a Blogger theme that was, as far as I could tell, pretty cutting edge compared to most Blogger themes.  Yet after I converted to Wordpress, I realized that the Blogger theme was still kind of clunky. 

4) You will have to start over on your Alexa rankings, so really the sooner the better.  Do you have to do everything weekend in terms of transitioning your domain?  No.  But at the very least you want to get your real domain active and start notifying your users to use that one. The nice thing about Blogger is that it will handle the redirects from your .blogspot address to your new one.

5) Blogger URLs and WordPress URLs are different, even if you modify your Wordpress 'standard' to match the closest that Blogger can do.  Long story short, when you have a blog title containing the words 'A', 'The', and I believe 'And', Blogger doesn't include those in the title, where Wordpress does.  Thus, when you do an import, Wordpress will have different titles for any of those posts, and I believe Blogger truncates the URL for longer post titles, so you could have some truncation as well.  There are WordPress plugins that will 'redirect' the page, but I'm not trustworthy of such things, so I actually went article by article and modified the imported URLs.  I had 500 articles and probably 20% were affected, so it took some time.  Point being, the longer you wait, the more bulky your transition will be.

My recommendation would be to get the new URL activated on Blogger.  I probably wouldn't start the WordPress transition just yet but would start planning on doing so and getting familiar with it, and plan on transitioning off Blogger in the next 4-6 weeks.

Let me know if I can help further.

Watson Inc said:

I think you can use Discus too, so you can add a 3rd-party commenting system without incident.

Hmmm…I never had luck trying to install an outside commenting platform on Blogger, but that could negate the issue from the first item above. I still think WordPress is the way to go. 

If for no other reason than with Blogger, Google technically controls your content and can shut you down.  I can't remember the bloggers name, but a year or two ago a rather popular blog that was hosted on Blogger was shut down with no warning.  Unfortunately, he wasn't backing his stuff up, and Google wouldn't re-instate him nor would they give him his content, so he was effectively finished.  Yes, had he backed his stuff up he could have re-launched with minimal damage, but that's still one heck of a scary proposition.

Thanks for all of the advice.  As far as the commenting goes, the updates they added this week fix all of the problems I had with the old system, and I haven't noticed any new issues yet.

Watson Inc said:

One more thing, there are a bunch of people who made the transition from Blogger to WP. Check out the follow threads too for contact info, hiccups, and pertinent details regarding the transition.

http://yakezie.com/forums/blog…..38;ret=all

http://yakezie.com/forums/blog…..38;ret=all

http://yakezie.com/forums/blog…..38;ret=all

Thanks.  I had tried searching before I posted this, but apparently I was either being too specific or not specific enough.  I just kept coming up with threads comparing the two.

MoneyBeagle said:

1) Unless something has changed, when you click the comment tab, that takes you to a Blogger.com page.  Anything you do at that point is done on the Blogger.com domain.  What does that mean?  Blogger gets the Alexa juice for anybody that has the toolbar installed.  When you go to Wordpress, your commenting platform is self-hosted, so you get the clicks.  It might be a small thing but I believe it adds up.

5) Blogger URLs and WordPress URLs are different, even if you modify your Wordpress 'standard' to match the closest that Blogger can do.  Long story short, when you have a blog title containing the words 'A', 'The', and I believe 'And', Blogger doesn't include those in the title, where Wordpress does.  Thus, when you do an import, Wordpress will have different titles for any of those posts, and I believe Blogger truncates the URL for longer post titles, so you could have some truncation as well.  There are WordPress plugins that will 'redirect' the page, but I'm not trustworthy of such things, so I actually went article by article and modified the imported URLs.  I had 500 articles and probably 20% were affected, so it took some time.  Point being, the longer you wait, the more bulky your transition will be.

What do you mean by the comment tab?  The comments are on the same page as the post, aren't they?  Are the individual posts on a blogger domain?  As far as the URLs, that hadn't occurred to me.  I'll have to take a look at my posts and see how many will be affected.  Though, if I have links within my posts they'll need to be updated regardless of whether I move to wordpress or not, right? 

Do comments move with the posts when you go from blogger to wordpress?

Right now I'm thinking of just doing the domain transfer this weekend.  I think I have a lot more research and work to do figuring out blogger before I try to move that over.  (If I decide to go through with that.  Still undecided.)

Glen Craig – Free From Broke said:

In the meantime, check out sites you like and find out what themes they are using and see if they fit your needs.  Many used premium, paid for, themes, but there are plenty of good free themes out there.

Here is another site that has some great Blogger templates (themes).  Many of them look very similar to some Wordpress templates.  http://btemplates.com/

Matt76Allen said:

Glen Craig – Free From Broke said:

In the meantime, check out sites you like and find out what themes they are using and see if they fit your needs.  Many used premium, paid for, themes, but there are plenty of good free themes out there.

Here is another site that has some great Blogger templates (themes).  Many of them look very similar to some Wordpress templates.  http://btemplates.com/

Thanks.  I'll look through those.  It seems like there are a lot more options than just using blogger.

I have moved from Blogger to Wordpress three times for all of my sites (a long time ago now). I highly suggest moving to Wordpress as soon as possible if you are looking for long term blogging success.