We have not posted here in two weeks, due to some major technical issues with Blogger. I’m going to write a little about those technical difficulties, mainly in case I need to refer to this information in the future. If you’re not interested in that, just skip this post, and simply know that we will now once again be posting at our regular rate of “whenever.” Some minor things about the site may be messed up, but I’ll be working on it.
Blogger provides a few options for publishing a blog, the most popular of which are:
- Blogger will host your blog at something.blogspot.com. This is nice (totally free, you can set it up in seconds), but you can never, ever switch away from blogger without losing your domain name (and all your links from search engines).
- Your domain name can forward to a blogspot.com address in the background. I think this is fairly new, seems like a reasonable choice.
- Blogger will publish the HTML for your blog to an FTP server which you specify. This is what we have always done.
So what happens is, you go to blogger.com, type up your latest post, and click submit. Blogger creates the HTML for your post, connects to your FTP server using the account info you set up, and uploads the HTML. For some reason, this has been notoriously buggy, and as of 2 weeks ago it just quit working for us. When I would try to publish a post, I would get this error message:
java.net.UnknownHostException: thekurths.com
I googled that error, tried asking on some Blogger forums, etc. The only thing I could guess is that my hosting service (ehostpros) was blocking Blogger from connecting via FTP. I contacted the host, they said “nope, not us.” The Blogger forums aren’t that helpful, and it’s not a service we pay for, so what did I expect?
Now, the good news: switching to WordPress was so easy. WordPress is software you install (unlike Blogger, which is an external service). Although instructions are easily found on the web, I will repeat them here.
- Install WordPress 2.2 (or later, I suppose; earlier versions may not have an automatic Blogger importer, though). With ehostpros, I did this through cPanel -> Fantastico, and it took literally 20 seconds.
- On Blogger, go to Settings -> Publishing and make sure you are publishing to a blogspot.com domain. This is required for WordPress to be able to import your blogger posts.
- Login to WordPress as an admin.
- Go to Manage ? Import ? Blogger and follow the directions.
- When the import is complete, go here and follow the instructions. (Basically, install a plugin and run it to maintain your Blogger permalinks; otherwise, all the posts linked to from Google will have new URLs, and you’ll lose your Google PageRank).
I did a little more before launching this (like edit the WordPress template), but that’s the gist.