Blogger’s Out, WordPress is in.

Posted on | February 7, 2010 | No Comments

Welcome to Shane Hale on WordPress

Over the years I’ve expressed my support for Blogger as a blogging platform, however Google and specifically the Blogger team have decided to stop supporting FTP. Well for me this just sucked. I had several blogs set up for me and other companies that relied on Blogger’s FTP publishing. I’ve used other blogging platforms, but blogger’s link with Google, and the simple fact it was all set up set me in my ways and routinely promoted it to my friends and family.

So the decision came down to who do I go with for a replacement. I knew right away I was going to lose a ton of SEO, unless I could match the file name & location of each post, archive, category etc, but I also knew blogger did a piss poor job of handling my meta data, without unique page titles and meta description. I also need a method to export and import all my previous posts. Recently playing with WordPress as a content management system and blogging platform with MacHTPCGuide.com I decided to leave Blogger behind, and upgrade my blog to WordPress.

As a blogging platform, it’s stand alone and fully lives on my server. I don’t have to worry about it deciding not to publish anymore. (or I hope not). It also has a ton of plug-ins for SEO friendliness. Blogger allowed me to export all my blogs to a file, and I found a webapp to convert them all to a WP File. Built a custom theme that match my old blog, imported the posts and was 95% there. All the Blogger labels ended up as Tags, which is good, but I they all were categorized as ‘Uncategorized’. Which I guess is ok… but I had to sit down and fix all that

So… after investing about 2-3 hours, the blog is all moved over. Hopefully it gets picked up by the search engines quickly, and I’m back to posting about internet marketing, chargers, padres, geeky stuff, design, and random shit.