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Today I am officially closing my original blog—hosted in Blogger since 2008. Since my blog posts are heavy on text and rarely have photos, I thought at first that Blogger satisfied me. I never thought twice about entering Blogger because I thought that WordPress.com was not free. Since I was 11 at that time (yes, I started blogging at a young age so you’ll probably notice changes in my writing style) I confused WordPress.com with WordPress.org. I recently just made up my mind to switch to WordPress.com after realizing that most of the bloggers I know use it because it looks a lot more “formal” (according to them) and “beautifully-made”—and they were right. Let’s talk about why and how I made the move.
Limited templates available
(from another blog that I co-manage with Kyugaku)
The main reason why I switched is because only a few templates are readily available in Blogger. I really didn’t like the stock templates so I usually get free ones online. Only a few are pretty and most of them are crappy. My Journalism teacher told me once that WordPress is better if you want your blog to look pleasing to the eye. He told me that a year ago and now I’m taking his advice.
I can see my blog in places I should’nt see it
I don’t even know what Club Penguin is.
I’m not really sure about this, but my blog’s everywhere. Sure, I googled it and most of the time it’s the answer to the question “how to remove kpcgrhynko..vbs” but in some cases, it’s not. I don’t know if using WordPress will avoid it, but at least I’m sure I’m free from the hands of Google, but not completely.
No galleries
I used to struggle with my photos in Blogger before. I tried to think of tricks on how to rearrange some photos, or make them look uniform because they usually have different orientations. You definitely cannot arrange your photos in a grid or make them look like they’re in an album.
How I transferred everything
- In your Blogger dashboard, click Settings and then under it, click Other.
- Under Blog Tools, click Export Blog. You will be prompted with this message: “Export your blog into the Blogger Atom export format. You can do this to move your blog to another blogging service or simply to store your blog on your own hard drive.” Click Download Blog.
- Go to WordPress and make an account if you don’t have one. Create your blog from there.
- In WP Admin (yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-admin), hover the pointer over Tools and click Import.
- Choose your blog host from the list. (Blogger, for this case.)
- Upload your blog data (the one you downloaded from Blogger earlier) and upload it. Your posts and the comments that come along with it will be posted on your new WordPress blog.
Actually, the struggle I had was beyond this. Of course I did not delete the Blogger blog yet because I had to redirect all visitors (Oh, all those 287,098 views!!!) from my old blog to the new one, and that’s a different story. Of course, I deleted all my posts and pages on Blogger, leaving only the annoucement that I already left. Besides this, my newly-transferred posts on WordPress lost all of their jump breaks (or Read More tag) so I had to replace them, and I believe I’m not done with that yet.
All bloggers have this time when they realize “my blog does not look right.” I have passed through that stage. And if you’re a blogger and you haven’t felt that yet, you will, someday.
~Kairu
Two-faced life 