I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want out of my blog. Every now and then, I think every blogger goes through this, and thinks about what they can do to spruce up their blog. But this time, I haven’t been thinking about sprucing up the design or adding/subtracting features from my blog. Quite honestly, there’s one thing that’s been standing in my way: WordPress. Yep, you heard me right. Since I’ve had WP as my blogging platform, I don’t feel like I know my blog as well as I used to. All the different parts of the template confuse me, php is a mystery, and after more than 18 months, I still don’t know the first thing about the database. I fumbled my way around FTP to install a new theme, and even trying to customize it seemed a heck of a lot harder. And frankly, I don’t have the time to learn all this stuff. When I started out, I had a job that, well, I took advantage of my time there. I did a lot of my blog work at work for the first 6 months. I don’t have that kind of time now, and it’s been a huge stumbling block with my blog.
The constant need for updates on here, that bugs me too. Like I said, I don’t have the time to learn all the technical stuff, and while my web host, Snoskred, works hard to keep it all updated, I’m sure it’s a job and a half, and not one I’d want. The more time I spend on WP, the less I want to know about all that backend stuff. I just want to write, then go out and read other blogs. Comment, spend time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. The fun stuff. The back end of it may be fun for some of you, but not for me. It’s frustrating. I only want to get into the coding part when it comes to my design, and I don’t even enjoy that part of it on WP as I used to at Blogger.
So yeah, I’m contemplating going back to Blogger. I still really love my design on there, one that I worked really hard on and was actually able to get all the spacing and other nit-picky things perfect on. I know I can take my domain with me, and I know it would be a lot of work getting all my posts updated on there. I already set up a test blog and tried importing my blog, but that didn’t work, so I’d have to copy and paste all of them. But I know that backdating works. I’d have to change all my backlinks, which would be a pain, but it can be done. And I can set up a backup blog on wordpress.com, just for backup, though blogger does have an import/export feature now. I know it seems like it would be taking two steps back, but staying on wordpress feels like keeping way too many features that I just don’t need. There’s a lot that wordpress does that I don’t care about, don’t know about, and don’t want to know about. I just want to have fun with it all again.
Has anyone done this – gone back to a free, hosted blog after being self-hosted? How did it go? Any tips? I’m seriously thinking this over, because like I said, I want it to be fun again.
Feel exactly the same way — this post brought me here in the search for a solution to export wp to blogger.
I’ve started 2 new blogs on blogger, and it’s so much easier –
- small tinkering with templates to get colours and fonts the right size
- being able to put ads up (something I’ve since removed, but nice to have the option)
And now my blogger blogs look 10 times better than the one blog that’s supposed to be my shop front.
So hope you manage to make the transition. I’m more than willing to paste individual posts and pages (ah, pages – maybe that’s the problem) – so reluctant am I to wrestle with WP’s dashboard any longer… Just need to do it now…
Mossos, some of the links in my blogroll are Blogger-specific tips, like BlogU, and they give tips on how to have pages, or at least the appearance of pages, in Blogger. I’m still thinking about the move. It would be a lot of work to get everything back on Blogger, which is part of the biggest thing stopping me (that and the URL, but that would have to come last). At least test blogs are easier to set up in Blogger!
okay – it’s fun again, couldn’t import the exported file from WordPress…
…until I found this link
http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/
from this blog here
http://www.shadyyoussef.com/2009/07/why-and-how-to-import-wordpress-blog.html
Just seems to have worked – I’ve chosen not to instantly post what I’ve imported, am selecting the posts, but they all seem to be there – except for the “pages” yet, so I’ll probably copy and paste those as posts, and link to those posts in the sidebar – no more messing around with that dumb ‘parent tree’ – yay!
Wow, you did a whole bunch of work for me! Thank you so much, those links look great and I’ll certainly give that a try on my test blog a bit later when I’m at my home computer.
Too bad it doesn’t take care of backlinks, but I tend to be lazy about using them so it shouldn’t be too big a deal – I think only about 10% of my posts have them.
I have to say, for all the issues, Blogger has been super easy. I like that you CAN do fancy backend stuff but you don’t HAVE to.
And I love BlogU. She writes on a level I can actually follow!
Yeah, that’s one of the things I liked as well – you don’t even have to know the hex code for a color, because there’s an interface to change all that super easy! And I still read BlogU – never stopped. Blogger stuff has always been easy to understand, and when I see blogs or posts about WP stuff, it just confuses the heck out of me. So I guess that’s all saying something, eh?
Of course that every blogger thinks about improving his blog. I take inspiration from my collection of ideas and it I alone made and I recommend you to do the same. You can relax and you do not worry because it is the only way to think properly.
I agree that every blogger thinks about improving. But in my case, I’m not looking so much to improve the blog itself, but the blogging experience. There’s just too much on WP that I don’t want to deal with.
I’m sure you can switch back to Blogger.
I personally love WP, but it’s true that I put a lot of time understanding how it worked and tweaking everything. AS for updates… I dread them! I still haven’t updated to the last WP version!
If it’s really holding you back, definitely switch. It’s too bad to not feel comfortable with your blog and refrain from writing because of it. We will follow you on Blogger!
Thanks, Zhu! I really did like all that WP had to offer – static pages being the biggest thing. But now that I have them, I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t really need them. If I do decide that I want pages, I know there’s a Blogger hack for that.