Recently, I’ve written a couple of posts which hinted at the problems I’ve been having since I was involuntarily upgraded to Blogger‘s new platform and tonight was the final straw. For a while now, I’ve wanted to implement a category system for posts and a couple of months back I did actually start to tag my posts at del.icio.us in preparation for following Peter Chen’s advice for creating Blogger categories.
Unfortunately, the delicious2Blogger (D2B) method does not work with the new Blogger and to implement Blogger’s label system (in order to put a tag cloud on the site using phydeaux3’s label cloud code) I’ll need to upgrade my “classic template” to a “layout”. The problem is, that layouts are not supported for externally hosted sites that are published using FTP (like mine), so I’ll be stuck with my existing template, which has been broken since the upgrade.
Seeing as Blogger seems to be so full of limitations and I’m in the middle of a site redesign anyway, I’m seriously considering a move to a WordPress-based site – as long as I can preserve all the links and comments. I’ve also been having some issues with my hosting provider (and the fact that they have recently been bought by BT doesn’t fill me with joy either) so I’m probably going to move away from them too.
I’ll be trying to minimise the impact on blog readers and hope to maintain the domain name and all the links, but please bear with me if there are a couple of hiccups along the way.
Hi,
I am having the same problems. I would really like a tag cloud, but am struggling with Blogger. So, two questions:
1. How did you transfer all your Blogger posts over to WordPress?
2. Was it easy to implement Andreas’ template – I am using a hack of one of his templates, andreas00 I think.
Cheers,
Motley Health.
Hi Motley – you’ll find the details of my Blogger to WordPress migration in this post; however I think the method I used to get the posts over has since been throttled to 500 posts (lucky I got mine over before that happened).
As for the tag cloud, I do have some advice – think very carefully about your taxonomy. Mine’s totally out of control and now I’m faced with the prospect of re-tagging over a thousand posts…
Good luck with the migration. It’ll be worth it on the other side – I’m really glad that I made the switch.
I have finally got around to the big migration. Did it yesterday, and everything seems to be working just fine. Even managed to keep my Blogger URLs in tact. Still checking on the best widgets to use with WordPress, there are hundreds to chose from!