Shifted To WordPress

April 28, 2009 | By Naman Bagga | Filed in: Blogging, General, Tech Talk.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was planning to shift to self-hosted WordPress.I’m finally done with all the shifting.

I was using GoDaddy’s Ad supported free hosting with my domain.Initially,I upgraded my free account to an Economy hosting account.When I tried renewing the account for 3 years, it was costing me around $152.So, I took a backup of all my data and canceled the hosting account.It took about 2 days for the payment to be refunded. Now I bought a new hosting account and used a coupon code -‘cjchost’ to get a 20% discount.Effectively, it cost me about $116 for 3 years.

Installing WordPress was a cakewalk with GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection.I imported all my blogger posts through wordpress, unexpectedly without any errors or problems.Then I edited the permalink structure to

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

This is to match the blogger permalinks with the wordpress ones.Due to some reasons like long post title and changing post title, some links were still different from the blogger links.I used the following php script to match all the permalinks with blogger links-

<?php
require_once('wp-load.php');

$res = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_id, meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'blogger_permalink'");
$wpdb->print_error();

foreach ($res as $row){
$slug = explode("/",$row->meta_value);
$slug = explode(".",$slug[3]);

$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET post_name ='" . $slug[0] . "' WHERE ID = $row->post_id");
$wpdb->print_error();
}

echo "DONE";
?>

You just need to copy this script in a file and name it anything like ‘fix.php’ for instance.Now run this script once,it should display DONE as output.

The next part was choosing the theme.Ankur helped me do this part.I was looking for 3 column WordPress 2.7 compatible themes.I finalized on QuickPress.

Next was making my Blogger blog inaccessible and publishing my wordpress blog on http://www.namanb.com .I deleted the www CNAME entry initially and later realized when Ankur pointed it out that I needed to create a CNAME entry @ for www.

After installation, I faced a small problem with cookies.When I visited my blog after logging in from the admin page,I was not logged in.The problem was that I changed the blog path to www.namanb.com and the WordPress path was namanb.com.Thus the login cookie was for namanb.com.I changed the WordPress path to www.namanb.com to solve the problem.

Finally, my blog is now shifted to my own hosting running WordPress.There’s probably nothing more I need for my blog.


8 comments on “Shifted To WordPress

  1. Dude,
    well…

    So u hv shifted…
    Bt wht i wanna knw is..
    Y??

    Jst y..??

    i dnt hv nythng against wordpress..
    Bt still,

    namab.com was really interesting to see earlier and not nw..

    Atleast change the theme..
    Itz nt luking gud..

    Itz my opinion..

    U hv d powers…
    Do wht u thnk…

    BEST OF LUCK @ WORDPRESS…!!!

    • Well,I can write an essay on why WordPress is better than Blogger.Anybody in his right mind would agree.

      I was bored of the last theme and this time I wanted a clean and minimal theme to make my blog look less cluttered.I’ll eventually get bored of this theme too and sooner or later will switch to a new theme.

      • well..
        good for you and may be for your readers too..(that include me!!!)

        So,
        Please let me know too..
        why should i switch to wordpress..

        • With wordpress you have complete control over your blog publishing.You can do things you can’t think about doing in Blogger.Wordpress’s huge collection of plugins makes it even better.

          Blogger can’t even handle stuff like Trackbacks and comments properly.Until recently,when blogger got the embedded comment form which has been with wordpress for ages,this was the story of blogger’s comment system.

          Not only in comments,blogger is ages behind wordpress in all forms of development and features.Look at the threaded comments for instance.Had I been using blogger,I would’ve be writing @ replies.

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