Making the switch
I’m not advocating anyone switch, because each of us has different needs and expectations. If Blogger and BlogSpot fill your needs, there’s no reason to switch.
If you like the look and feel of Blogger, you can still use it to publish at your own site, rather than BlogSpot. This is useful if you want your own URL, or don’t want to be associated with BlogSpot. Anya does this at Out, Standing in Her Field.
If you’ve had it with Google/Blogger but still want a free blog, you could move to WordPress.com as Steve Bates has done with The Yellow Doggerelist. He uses the site to host his G-rated verse and cat pictures for friends and family who wouldn’t appreciate his writing at his main site.
If you want the ability to kvetch you could move to the Six Apart blogging empire for pricing starting at $4.95/month for the equivalent of a BlogSpot blog but the right to complain because you are paying something.
Six Apart now hosts TypePad and LiveJournal blogs with several levels of sites. Michael at Musing’s musings has a TypePad site, and Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged is on LiveJournal.
Six Apart also owns Movable Type blogging software that you use on your own server space, like Guy does at Rook’s Rant.
It’s a brave person indeed, who hand codes their blog, like Steve does at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat.
[The ghastly geek details below the fold]
When I made my decision to move the blog, I had already decided to move my personal website off of my ISP’s server. I am considering changing my service and would have been forced to move it at some point, and I wanted my own domain, WWW.Dumka.US, for business reasons. The hosting service I selected, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net does things a little differently than other services and that made hosting the blog there easier than at some hosts.
Having moved my site, I looked at blogging software. I had narrowed my choices to Greymatter, Movable Type, and WordPress some time ago, but I chose WordPress for business reasons. Greymatter and Movable Type both use the PERL language, which is fine by me, but I have a potential use for PHP & MySQL in the near future and WordPress is based on those products.
If you are not comfortable writing code I do not recommend taking the path I choose. You are entering the world of abbreviations: DNS, URL, URI, HTML, XHTML, XML, OPML, PHP, CSS, SQL, RSS, RAR, ZIP, FTP, etc. There are all kinds of people who are willing to help you, but if you aren’t comfortable with the terminology you may not understand what they are telling you. Many who know how to do things, may not have taken the time to learn how to explain to non-initiates.
The hosting at Nearly Free Speech [NFS] suits my needs. I pay $ 1.00 per gigabyte of bandwidth used and 1¢ per month for every megabyte of storage I actually use. It will take a while before I start to reach the cost of a basic TypePad site. You pay in advance and they accept PayPal, credit cards, checks, and money orders. If you don’t like to use “plastic” on the Internet this is a wonderful feature.
I hooked up with a cheap registration site so two years of domain registration cost me under $13.
NFS provides Domain Name Servers [DNS] with their account, MySQL and PHP software, File Transfer Protocol [FTP] access – everything I need. They don’t hold your hand and expect you to know what you are doing. If you aren’t comfortable installing your own software and setting up, they are not for you. There are sites that specialize in setting up blog sites for specific software and they may be a better choice if you don’t have the experience to do it yourself.
After setting-up whynow.Dumka.us, I activated a MySQL process and created a blank database. I downloaded the software from WordPress.org, unZIP-ed it, and then used my FTP program to copy the files to the site.
If you have gathered all of the required names and passwords asked for in the WordPress readme file, the actual installation is extremely quick and painless. If you are starting a brand new blog and are will to accept the defaults, you can begin posting almost immediately.
If you want to bring over your archives from BlogSpot things are a bit more complicated. You may have to make some change to your Blogger settings and republish your entire blog, which is dependent on Blogger cooperating. On the WordPress side, the transfer is fairly easy, a couple of clicks. I lost my April, 2005 archive in the move, but I have a back-up so I will be rebuilding it when I find the time.
There are ways of recovering your Haloscan comments, but I’m not going to attempt it. I check for new comments on Haloscan daily.
I’ll cover some of the changes I’ve made in the basic look of my site, and the pain that you encounter moving your blogroll in another post.
4 comments
Thanks for the summary, Bryan. I’m bookmarking this post in case I switch someday, or in case someone else needs a basic outline of the options and the choices to be made.
I would never recommend to anyone, techno-geek or not, that he or she hand-code a blog. My site was up and running before I started blogging; I already had a lot of tools around, and everything else I needed could be done in a few editor macros and a bit of JavaScript. At every point, it was easier for me to enhance the existing site than to move to a blogging service or (heaven forfend) develop a “real” blogging tool from scratch. The main downside of my current “system” (I use the word very loosely) is that there’s not really a back end; everything is served as pre-coded HTML files and expands itself client-side using JavaScript. In other words, “there’s no there there.” Of course I would never advise a client to take this approach; it’s legacy code for me.
Having used the hosted WordPress interface on wordpress.com for a while, I like it well enough. It’s at least no worse than Blogger, and so far it hasn’t given me even a moment’s trouble. If I ever make the switch, I will probably do much the same thing you did: create a new site on my existing NearlyFreeSpeech account, install WordPress there, and resume blogging, leaving the old site in place rather than attempting to import my very nonstandard format.
I look forward to your post on moving the blogroll.
I have to do some complaining about the world before I get back to it.
Not that it really matters now (since I’m permanently retired from blogging), but does WordPress require some sort of database support (like MySQL) on the back end?he
In my case, I chose Greymatter because it didn’t require a database back end (because the peculiarity of my web hosting plan is that I have to pay extra for MySQL support, and I didn’t feel like paying for that). When Karen gets back from Lotus Land and sees the mention of Greymatter in your post I expect her to kvetch a bit at that mention (for some reason Greymatter and her never really got along…). 🙂
IIRC, Movable Type requires MySQL support too, and had the reputation as reqiring near wizardly skills to configure and run, both of which factors steered me away from that.
Oh, yeah, PHP and MySQL are required for WordPress, and that was a determinate in host selection. NFS includes one process in the basic plan if you ask for it.
PERL doesn’t require it, so Greymatter didn’t use it, opening up a wider range of hosts.
I’ve noticed that some people, especially those that like to rearrange their sites every few months, spend a lot of time “tweaking” MT.