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First of all, Happy New Year to all of our readers.
Second, We have a surprise for you. No, it's not only a design change. We changed everything, including platform. Now, BWS is "Powered By WordPress". We did this because although Blogger (aka Blogspot) is feature rich, it did not offer much control. We could not optimize posts for Search Engines, only template could be optimized and that meant we had the same Meta Tags for every post. Pages were not supported, we had to write posts for use as pages and link to them from the menu. A big reason (at least for me) was incompatibility with Opera. Blogger works horribly with the Opera browser!
Within two days after Migration, we began to love WordPress. We have plug ins for almost everything. One plug in checks our posts for broken links and images, another adds Meta information to posts, another redirects traffic to new URLs and so on. Also, using WordPress allows us to cover that platform with more depth and tell you about new features we're learning to use. But our experience with Blogger means that we will also be covering it. (Our Personal Blogs are still on Blogger!)
We enjoyed our holidays a lot and hope you did too. Now, we are in working mode. You will see many new things here.
Our migration was no shorter than an adventure with twists and turns. First, I added "Read More" option to many of our posts imported from Blogger. That broke the template. Later, we found that it was Blogger's junk code that caused this. So, I removed the "Read More" option. After that we hunted for a perfect plug in to manage ads and guess what, we found none. Many were not user friendly, many did not track clicks. But now Ads are okay now! (Did you check our Sponsors in the sidebar?) If you want to know how, I will be writing about our Ad Manager soon.
Then I changed the Permalink structure to not use the date and '.html' in the page name, only to find that existing links were broken due to this. Then we found a (you guessed it) plug in that redirects links. After adding, 50 redirects, we were able to change the permalink structure.
But the mother of all problems showed up on Dec. 30! Blog started taking ages to load and showed nothing in Sidebar. I was away for holiday and only member online was SBA. She spent 4 hours and found the problem. It was a corrupt plugin.
Actually, we broke and fixed this template so many times within 48 hours that we lost count after 238!
Hey, what are you thinking? No, we are not going to start the year with this post! (Oops.. We just did!).
Note: Although we installed the redirection plug in, there may be dead URLs left. If you encounter any broken links or see something strange in the design, please Contact Us (On the brand new form, that is!).
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{ 16 comments }
i like this new look. it's clean and neat, easy to the read, cool to the eyes. im a lil intrigued though. you're using wordpress but looking at the blogs i follow, it seems you're still in blogger. hmmm..
congrats on your alexa rank! whooping 151 813. your traffic is impressive and to think it's been only two months since i last visited.
Techniqueal, thanks for your feedback, I like blue also — and we know you love teal!!
As for the Alexa we're happy to have come 'a long way' with the help of readers like you.
Now, let's solve that mystery [there are no smoke and mirrors here!]. Everyone with a Blogger dashboard (i.e. you) can add any blog to their 'follow list'. Take a look at the Add a site and you can either key the URL or select it from your Google Reader. So since you were so forward thinking as to follow us while we were on Blogger we migrated rather smoothly on your dashboard — we've being using our custom domain name (URL) from day one on Blogger. Guess we suspected the Blogger thing might not last. Good thing Google is gracious enough not to block us! And you heard it here first: Blogger Followers are now integrated with Google Friends (GF) — I deleted my GF gadget on my personal blog and suddenly saw the icon below my followers box! That Google is smart!
bloggingwithsuccess.net – cooooolest domain name)))
@Brian Elliot – Thanks for such a warm welcome — I see you have good taste (same template) and we should make good neighbors! I didn't think I'd ever like WP as much as I do. Self-hosting makes a big difference. We're taking the plugins one step at a time considering recent disasters. But your point is well taken. Thanks.
Welcome to WordPress. I also started on blogger, but since using WordPress, I've fallen in love. By the way, we're both using the same WordPress template.
Why not add Gravatar capability to your comments with a Gravatar plugin ?
Hi
Nice Post with gud information
I agree with the switch 100%. If you truly want to be professional and gain an audience, you eventually have to break away from template-feature-limited sites. Whether you are on wordpress.com or blogspot, you must break away to have full control (like you mention) as well as grant yourself the opportunity to establish an identity.
When I see a blog URL that has blogspot in it, I cringe. It's not that I think blogspot is bad, but most blogs on blogspot are bad. Thus, if you want to break away, you must get your own domain and host your own wordpress.
If you are looking for hosting, visit my site, and see what we can do for you.
Cheers,
Eric
Cool site here! I would like to migrate also to wordpress but I have some reservations. thanks for sharing this. will think about it again:-)
happy blogging!
http://ondiamondmum.blogspot.com/
Well, so nice.
The layout is veryyyyyyy good now.
@ Armen Shirvanian
Yes, plug-ins are enjoyable but if they are added carelessly, they can break the blog! Surely, they very useful!
We can see that you made a lot of changes here. Plug-ins sure are as enjoyable to set up as extensions for Firefox. They are like small pieces of program that only add to the value of what we are using. They tend to automate most items of interest, and it is hard to think of a useful plug-in that hasn't already been coded. Altering your template multiple times is a great way to stay in "upgrade mode", and that can only help the site.
@ How To Blog
Actually, we also wanted a good magazine style theme and have found 3 good ones. But Blogger posts have a lot of junk code which breaks theme when we apply Read More link. I tried adding it and sidebar went blank. no theme worked correctly. Once we have enough posts written in Wordpress, we can go on to adopt a magazine style theme!
Happy New Year to you Too.
It looks like bloggingwithsuccess has undergone some changes lol. I'm glad you moved to wordpress, in my opinion it's way better. A lot more freedom like you said. I like the new template better then the old one, but still I'd recommend finding something a little more unique at some point. A lot of blogs have this same template and so at some point I would recommend either creating and just uploading a new one. Though this one is definitely cleaner then the last one. Happy New Year all you BWS writers, I hope this year brings you much success.
@ Ben Pei
Yes, plugins make Blogger look featureless. Its not a bad one although! But Wordpress makes tasks easy! Especcially multiple members can be managed well in Wordpress, something we need!
Creative Jumkie
How did holidays went?
I think we go easily with Wordpress because of the smooth interface of Version 2.7 Its much improved over 2.5!
I've been MIA for the last week or so due to the holidays and come back to see your new digs!
Looks great! If only I was proficient in wordpress … my life would be so much simpler.
With wordpress plugins, you almost have nothing to worry about! Makes blogging so much easier that way.. Isn't it?