My Journey From Blogger to WordPress

I recently moved my blog, Modern Ekklesia, over from Blogger to WordPress, and I wanted to share a little about my journey so that you’ll know what to expect in case you want to do it as well.

So here’s what happened:

On my new blog, I wanted to go with a self-hosted solution for the options that are available. After evaluating some of the options, I decided to go with Dreamhost, and all the posts were moved over. There were a few things that didn’t survive the journey very well, though.

1. My comments. While on Blogger, I was doing my comments through Intense Debate. They work really well and there’s lots of cool options you can use for them. But if you ever want to move from the platform you have, you’re going to have problems. Intense Debate advertises that they have an option to transfer your comments over from ID (Intense Debate) to WordPress, but it didn’t actually work. This, for me, was a heart break. I couldn’t imagine loosing the record of all those good comments and conversations. After all, that’s the whole reason why I started this blog, is because I wanted us to be able to converse and dialogue and wanted us to learn together on these topics.

So I made the decision that I was going to get a divorce from ID and never use them again. I’d rather just have the WordPress commenting system, even though it doesn’t have as many options. Thankfully, I found a company that had figured out a way to transfer comments from ID to WordPress, and since I didn’t have a ton of comments they did it quickly and cheaply.

2. Subscribers. I don’t know how. Maybe you guys know. But in the period of time in which this blog was “offline” we lost about half of the RSS subscribers. Granted, there weren’t that many to begin with, but there were about 60 RSS subscribers that didn’t survive the trip for some reason. This, for me was quite painful as well because it represents conversations. So I feel like, in a sense, we’re starting over concerning subscribers.

3. Theme issues. The original theme I had (Thesis) ended up giving me some issues, so I ended up going with the Standard Theme, and I’ve been very happy with it.

Overall, it was a tough experience. But now that I’m here and the site is up and running I’m very happy with the end result. There were still even more issues that happened under the hood, but no need to bore you all with that.

If you’re thinking of moving from Blogger to WordPress, maybe you should think twice. That is, unless you really know what you’re doing or have some professional help to walk you through it. And even then, things always fall through the crack.

[image by chez rump]